The Arise Podcast

BIO: Sandra Van OpstalEXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND CO-FOUNDER OF CHASING JUSTICESandra Maria Van Opstal, a second-generation Latina, is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Chasing Justice, a movement led by people of color to mobilize a lifestyle of faith and justice . She is an international speaker, author, and activist, recognized for her courageous work in pursuing justice and disrupting oppressive systems within the church. As a global prophetic voice and an active community member on the west-side of Chicago, Sandra's initiatives in holistic justice equip communities around the world to practice biblical solidarity and mutuality within various social and cultural locations.https://chasingjustice.com/sandra-van-opstal/ Giving in Chicago: https://newlifecenters.org/ Ordg to follow in chicagohttps://www.icirr.org/ Tshirt https://secure.qgiv.com/for/peoplearenotillegalt-shirt/Danielle (00:09):good afternoon, y'all. I have a second video coming to you from my dear friend and colleague in Chicago, Humboldt Park area, a faith leader there that collaborates with the different faith communities in the area. And she's going to talk about some ways she's personally affected by what's happening by the invasion there and how you can think about things, how you might get involved. I hope you'll join me in this conversation and honor yourself. Stay curious, honor, humanity, get involved. Take collective action. Talk to your own neighbor. Let's start caring really well for one another.Oh wow. Sandra, you know me. This is Jenny McGrath. This is my colleague. She's a bible nut. She wrote out the Bible How many times?Like scripture nut and a researcher, a therapist and purity culture, kind of like Survivor, but did a lot of work with women around that. And we talk a lot about race and current events. And I restarted my podcast and I asked Jenny if she'd want to join me. She has a great love for justice and humans and making a difference. So that's kind of how Jenny joined up with me. Right. Anything else you want to say?Sandra, I saw your post on social media and I was like, I could do that. I could contribute to that. And so that's what I'm here to do. Want to hear about your experience. What does resilience look like for you all over there? What do you need from us? How can we be a part of what's happening in Chicago from wherever we are? And if there's practical needs or things you want to share here, we can also send those out.Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, where you're located in Chicago, and just a little bit even about your family, if you're willing?Sandra (01:40):Yeah, sure. So it's great to be with you guys. I'm Sandra Van Opal and I'm here on the west side of Chicago in a neighborhood called Humble Park. It's if you see in the news with all that's happening, it's the humble Hermosa, Avondale kind of zone of the ice crackdown. Well, let's not call it a crackdown. The ice invasion(02:06):Here in Chicago. I am the daughter of immigrants, so my mom is from Columbia. My father was from Argentina. They came to live in Chicago when they were in their twenties and thirties. They met in English class, so they were taking TOEFL exams, which is an exam you take in order to enter into college and schooling here in the US to show your language proficiency. And so they met learning English and the rest is history. I grew up here. I've lived here my whole life. I'm raising my family here. I'm married. I have two kids that just turned 11, so they're in fifth grade and sixth grade. And the school that they go to is a primarily immigrant school immersion, Spanish immersion. So it's a school where you take classes basically 90% in Spanish when you start and you move every year a little bit more English until you graduate when you're 50 50.(03:03):And so the school context they've been in has been receiving a lot of new neighbors, a lot of new classmates. And for that reason, actually most of their classes are still almost fully in Spanish, so they should probably be 60 40 right now. But I think a lot of their curriculum is still in Spanish, or the children have the option of having the math book in Spanish or English if they want it. If they're supposed to be English Spanish, or sorry, English math this year, then they might choose to have a Spanish book even if the instruction is in English. So that's the context I live in. I am here. I live in a home. I have chickens and a garden, and I love to be outside watching my neighbors and connecting with people. And we have a black club in our community, so a lot of our information that we're sharing with each other is through our email list and our signal group. Yeah. Oh, also what I do, I run an organization called Chasing Justice, which is focused on the intersection of faith and making the world a better place. And I am a local pastor and author on issues of worship and justice. So that's my function in this world.Danielle (04:31):I think we talk about what's happening in one sense, it seems like social media and other ways like Zoom, we're on a screen with Zoom and we're all in three different locations right now. We think of ourselves as really connected. But then when tragedy strikes or trauma or an invasion, for instance, strikes, we're connected, but it seems like we're also disconnected from one another and the practical needs and storytelling on the ground, and what does resilience look like for one person versus another? Or what does survival versus thriving look like for one person versus another? And how do we kind of join together and form a collective bond in that? I've been thinking a lot about that after I read your post Sandra on Instagram and what does that mean for me? And just as I'm talking, what does that mean for you or what are thoughts that come to mind for you?Sandra (05:27):Yeah, I am think I remember what posts you're referring to, but I think part of it is whenever something happens in our world, I believe that because of the highly digitally connected world that we're in, it feels like we are all supposed to say something. That's how we respond. Something happens and we all go, that's not right, which I think is good, we should say that, but I think the frustration, I'm sure people in LA and DC felt that, but it's like something is happening in your real life every day to your neighbors and everybody all around the country is commenting on it and commenting with such confidence and commenting with such expertise, and you're like, wait a minute. That's not how I would say that. And I think the reason that maybe that post came up for me as a kind of, it was less frustration and more sorrow, I think it felt more, more sorrow that the people that are most impacted by the issues are not the ones that are given the voice to talk about how those systems of oppression are impacting them. And I think the reason I think about things like that is I remember when I first started pastoring locally here. I mean, I had been working for a parachurch organization doing national and international work. I really felt like it was time for me to become a local pastor to understand, hey, if I'm going to be writing to pastors and speaking to pastors and challenging pastors, I should probably know what it's like to be one. And so I was supposed to be a five year stint, which ended up being 12 years pastoring locally.(07:08):And in my discussions with my staff team, I would often have one of them very respectfully, I was the executive pastors in a community with hierarchy. So they would very respectfully say, Hey, your friends that are out there blogging and writing articles and books, they're talking about stuff in ways we would never talk about it. They're talking about it in a tone that we would never use to talk about our situation and with words we would never use to describe our situation. And it's not that my friends maybe didn't have a perspective, it's that it didn't reflect their perspective. And so I think I became very sensitive to that, paying attention to, oh, how do expert justice people talk about issues of justice versus the people that are most impacted by those issues of injustice? Or how do people from within a community express their journey in ways that maybe even have a different tone than mostly anger that was coming out from the justice space?(08:10):And they're like, we wouldn't say it that way. We wouldn't talk about it that way. So I think because of that, it's really important when something happens in a local space and it is impacting us all nationally, national news, that we ask the question, how can I hear the voices of the people that this is most impacting? And so that's why I think I wrote that post. I was like, A lot of y'all have a lot to say about Chicago who don't live here and thank you, but no thank you. Invite us to talk for ourselves, invite us to speak for ourselves because there are local pastors and priests and imams and mental health providers who are experiencing this in a very real way that they probably could shed some light on what would be helpful to us. I called a bunch of friends in Los Angeles when things were happening there, and I was like, oh, how are you guys doing?(09:05):What's really happening? How can we help? If you don't have time to reply back, just know that I'm here praying for you, and I'm like with you and I'm sending money to the orgs. I see you posting and don't know what else to do. Obviously, the ice raids are impacting all of us across the country, but they're impacting each city in very different ways. Each city is a very different city with a very different ethos and a way of handling things. And as you guys know, Chicago is the best. I'm so proud of us right now. I'm so proud of us. We're like, no, you can't talk to us like that. No, you can't have our streets. But it also gets us into trouble because it's rooted in our philosophy of community organizing, though the linsky method, which is agitation, agitation, agitation. So we have stuff to learn too. But that's what you're seeing in Chicago is a lot of agitation. But yeah, that's why I wrote it. I wrote it like, I know 20 community leaders you could talk to here in Chicago that would give you a good idea of what we're experiencing and what would be best for us if you wanted to come alongside of us and help in prayer. So yeah.Jenny (10:27):Yeah, I think just a sense of wanting to hear more, whatever you feel. Well, and whatever feels safe to share in this podcast setting of just what it has been like for you to be on the ground in the community that you're in, in the roles that you're in with the family you're in. I just find myself curious about your experience.Sandra (10:52):Yeah. Okay. So I think about this in three different areas. One is, how is this impacting me as a parent, the other in my family and connected to family members. The other one is how is this impacting me as a neighbor? And then the other is, how is this impacting me as a civic leader, as a faith leader here? And so the hardest one has actually been, as a parent, if I could be honest with you, it's really been hard. Those of us that have raised kids, especially younger children or well all children, they each have their own season of development. But raising kids and being a village for children right now I think is really hard. They've gone through lockdown, George Floyd protests, watching multiple genocides, a war in Ukraine, and now this locally. And I believe in talking to your kids about what's happening and talking to them about it in ways that is appropriate for their age. So that has changed for me since my children were five when the pandemic started and now they're 11. That has changed for me what that looks like.(12:32):But there are many families, dozens of families in their school that have not returned since the ice raids have started. Their friends are missing from class. Ice has repeatedly been around their school. Ice has been on our corner where we grocery shop, get tacos, go to therapy. My son asked me the other day, will they throw me on the ground? If they see me, will they throw me on the ground? And this is one of my sons already struggles a lot with anxiety and he has anxiety, and he's also a black child. And so he's already been processing being black in the context of law enforcement in our city and what's happened. And so I think he kind of went through that season and he's like, so will they throw me on the ground if they see me? And I'm like, no, buddy. They're not going to. Hopefully there's enough cameras around that they'll throw you on the ground.(13:42):And so I think trying to figure out how to answer those kinds of questions. How can we think about our friends? How can we pray for our friends? We've done a lot more prayer in the 15 minute commutes to and from school, I think just for very specific needs that our neighbors are going through. And neighbor that I live in close proximity to the other day was running an errand and was detained by ice and was let go on the spot in the parking lot of the Home Depot, but its someone our kids know really well and helping them to process that. Their friend, a neighbor has gone through this, I think requires a different set of parenting skills and I believe are in most parenting books.(14:48):And so I find myself almost, man, I wish there was a resource for that man. I wish there was a place to talk about that. Let me talk to my neighbor about how they talk to their kids about that. And for those of us that come from Latino cultures, we don't really talk about hard things a lot. We're not really taught to talk about them. It's like we endure them and we go through them, but we don't give them space for processing. And so both of my children are in therapy. I don't know what they talk about in therapy, probably girls and love interests and bullying and all the rest of the things that kids talk about, but I think they probably unpack some of what they're going through with their friends. They are also wanting to make a difference. So we're trying to figure out what does that look for them to make things good in the community they live in.(15:42):So that's the first area is parenting. I don't know if you guys have anything to add advice to give me on that, but I think the hardest thing for me is what do we do with our children? What do we do with a generation that is growing up, watching their government step over so many boundaries, doing things that are completely illegal or unethical or dangerous for our society and feeling like, Hey, we're living in a time, I know a lot of people posted the quote from Ann Frank talking about what was happening in their streets. And I'm like, yeah, my kids are watching that. And I don't know how they're processing it or where they see their faith in the midst of that. I mean, luckily we have an amazing church. We talk about stuff like that all the time. So I mean, yeah, the mayor goes to our church and the pastor's an amazing person, and we have lots of civic leaders and law enforcement in our church. So I think they're watching, they're able to have some mentorship in that area, I think because spoken about from the pulpit, but man, being little must be really hard right now.Danielle (17:09):Maybe we don't need to press too fast, even though we're in a podcast right now. I think it bears the weight of just a little bit of space to just hang with that comment. I have older kids than you. As recently, I told my 20-year-old son who we are not suffering yet, the street raids. For some reason, Seattle hasn't been the focus point yet, but he did lose his federal aid and his Pell grants and everything for college this year. And so him and a lot of other kids had a significant do have a significant college tuition to make up. And we were talking about it and I was like, well, this will be the normal for you. This will be what's normal. This will be what's normal for our family. And my husband actually stepped in and said to me in a moment of despair and lament, because my son wants to be a music teacher.(18:21):He said to me, he's like, but you always tell me nothing's impossible. We can figure it out. And I was like, yeah, I do say that, but I don't believe it right now. He is like, well, he's like, I believe it right now. So I don't know what it looks like to come up with an extra for us. It's an extra $6,000, so we don't have the money yet, but what does it look like? But I think it goes back to that sense of finding some balance with our kids of what's real, what's not giving. What I hear for you, Sandra, and I'm kind of fumbling through my words, so maybe Jenny can step in, but offering our kids the validation of their reality that's so important in age appropriate and the different steps we're in the validation of reality. But I also find myself searching and grasping for where's the hope? Where are the strands of faith for our family? Where are the strands of hope searching for? Like you said, what are the practical actions your boys can do that also kind of I think plant seeds and generate hope in their hearts when we can step out and do actions?Sandra (19:43):Yeah. No, I think the hard part is I can't promise them things will get better. I can't promise them there's going to be an end to genocide in Palestine. I can't promise them. I keep telling everyone, when we pray at night and we talk about our days and stuff, and I just tell 'em, we, my husband and I tell 'em, and the only thing we can promise you is that God is with us. And I think the reality is when you've had proximity to our global siblings, that suffering didn't just start two Octobers ago or even for our own families. The suffering as my African brother once told me at a conference, he said, what do you mean when we suffer? Life is suffering and suffering is life. Or if we suffer, someone said, yeah, if we suffer, it's like some pretty from the west if we suffer.(20:35):It's like no, life is suffering and suffering is life. So I think part of it is we have within our story as people who follow the Jesus way, we have a story of people who have really always suffered. The story of scripture is a story of marginalized, persecuted, displaced people that are wandering in a land looking for home. And in those stories, you find God's presence with them. You find the worship of their creator. You find moments of joy, rhythms of feasting and fasting. You find all the traditions we do now that come out of the story of the people. So I can tell them, baby, I can only promise you that God is with us the same way that God was with, we go through the stories and the same way that God has always been with the black church in America, the same way that God has always been with our Latino community, the same way that God is with our siblings in Gaza, God is with us.(21:35):And so it doesn't take the pain away, but we can know that God is there. I try to teach my kids, lemme tell you, this is so bad parenting. Sorry, you can cut this out if you need to. But the other day we were praying for our country and I said, God, I just pray. Pray for Trump. I pray God, either you would change his heart or you would help him to go to sleep and just not wake up tomorrow. And then my son was like, I can't believe you prayed that prayer. Mom, I can't believe you said that. That's such a bad prayer. I was like, have you read the Psalms?(22:12):I was like, tonight, let's read a psalm. I'm going to read to you what David prayed for his enemies. And just because the Bible calls us to love our enemies and to see them as human does not mean we cannot pray that they will fall asleep. And so I said, I'm not saying I'm going to do anything bad. I know my phone's listening to me right now. I'm not saying I'm going to take matters into my own hands. I'm just saying I wouldn't be sad. That's all. And he's like, he just could not get over it because, and he just kept digging. Papa, Papa would never pray a prayer like that. He would never, I said, Papa hasn't read the Psalms. I read the Psalms. I know exactly what the Psalms say. And I was like, and the thing is because God is for good, because God is against evil and because God knows my heart, he knows God knows how much I love him, and I'm asking him to please take this evil away from our neighborhood.(23:04):Please take this evil away from our country. Please take this evil away. We're living in evil times, Terry. These are bad times. And this is not only a bad person. This is somebody that's raising up all of the badness to be allowed. And so I'm going to pray that prayer every day. And I know that you think it's not good, and I'm so sorry, but tonight we'll read the Psalms. Then that night we read some Psalms. I was like, see what David prays for his enemy. I said, and the thing is, God is there with us in our prayers. He's not like, what? I can't believe she cussed. I can't believe she said that bad. I can't believe she want to be friends with this guy that's too evil. And so I think part of it's processing faith with them. It's like, I don't know what kind of, let's just talk about Jesus and what he said. Let's talk about what the Bible models for us and prayer. Let's talk about It's okay to be mad. It's okay. It's okay to want evil to end. It doesn't mean we take things into our own hands, but it's okay to want the evil to end. And so those are the kinds of conversations where I go home, I'm like, okay, let me just look at my stuff. Is that wrong? Is that theologically correct? I called my husband. Do you think this is theologically okay? Am I mal forming our children? But I feel like it's an okay prayer, isn't it an okay prayer? Those are the kinds of things that are happening. I don't know,Jenny (24:37):I mean, I am not a theologian, but I think it's an okay prayer to pray. And I'm just thinking about, I've had two thoughts going through my mind, and one of course I couldn't and wouldn't want to put on some type of silver lining and be like, kids are going to be fine. They're resilient. And something that we say in the somatic trauma world a lot is that trauma isn't about an event. It's often about not having a safe place to go in the midst of or after an event. And what I just keep hearing is you making yourself available to be a safe place for your kids to process and reimagine what moving through this moment looks like. And also holding that in families that are being torn apart, that don't have those safe places to go in this moment. And I think part of what we're experiencing is this term, the boomerang of imperialism, as you said, these are not new things happening to families all over the world. And the ricochet of how we are now experiencing that in the heart of the empire, where I find my sense of hope is that that is the sign that the snake is eating its head and it will collapse. And I believe in rebirth and regrowth and hope that we can create a world that is different than a world that builds empires that do this to families. And as where my mind goes.Sandra (26:39):Yeah. And I think for ourselves, for our children, for in the work that I do with chasing justice with activists, it's like the only thing I can do, I'm not going to be able to change the world. The only thing I can do is change the little world that I'm in. So what can I do to make a difference and make things good in the world that I'm in? And so it boils down to very, very practical, tangible, embodied unfancy. Things like calling your neighbors and checking in on them to see if they need you to take their kids to school, finding out if everybody got home, okay. When there was a raid in a particular area, asking, or not even asking, but dropping food off for people and saying, Hey, we made a grocery room. We just thought we'd pick up some essentials for everybody.(27:27):Because part of it too is how do you do that without asking your, how do you help your neighbor without asking your neighbor their status? And that's not appropriate. And how do you help your neighbor without assuming they don't have money or making them feel like some kind of project? And so I think part of it is figuring out how to practice mutual aid in ways that are communal that just says, Hey, we picked up this. We figured this week we'd drop it off to five different families, and next week we'll do five other families. Who knows if they need it or not, but at least they know you're thinking of them. I think something you said about trauma, which I think is really important when you work in communities where you have communal, collective, complex generational trauma, which is we're just always living in this.(28:19):I have status, so I don't worry about leaving my home. I also am white. I'm a white Latina, so I'm not like, well, maybe they'll pull me over. Well, I don't know. But I know if I was browner my other family members that would definitely be like, please carry a copy of your passport and your ID at all times. But now I don't leave the house without, I used to leave the house with my keys and my phone, maybe a wallet. I don't know where a wallet is. Now I'm like, oh, I better have my ID on me(28:48):Mostly because if I intervene, I'm afraid if I get arrested, I won't have ID on me. But I think about all the ways that you have to leave the house differently now. And this is for people that they already felt vulnerable in their TPS, in their temporary protective status status or in their undocumented status or in their green card holder status or whatever status they had, that they already felt vulnerable in some way. And now if they don't go to work, their family doesn't eat, so they leave the house. But how do they leave the house? If you go to school every day and you're wondering if your parents are going to pick you up because now you're aware you have this emergency family plan, what does that feel like day in and day out, decade after decade to feel vulnerable? That kind of trauma is something I don't understand in my body, though I understand it as a concept.(29:47):It's the trauma of feeling vulnerable at all times of sending your kids out into the world. And because our US Supreme Court and because our government has decided it's okay to racially profile people, so I keep telling my mom, you better not be speaking Spanish at Target. She's bilingual. I'm like, please do not speak Spanish at Target. Do not open your mouth. And I would never have said that ever in the past, super proud of being a Latina and being bilingual, but I'm scared for my mom. And so I'm checking in on family members who have vulnerable status. I'm trying to find out if everybody's okay. So I think there are, it's like I told my husband the other day, and the car was like, can you imagine having this kind of fear day in and day out for decades at a time in a country and building a life?(30:44):And all of a sudden, many of our DACA recipients or young undocumented folks that are in college, all of a sudden they're not going to finish their degree. They're now in a country they don't even know. They didn't grow up there in a language they don't understand or their spouse is missing. And now they don't know if they're in Swatee, they don't know if they're in Mexico. They don't know where they are. And so I think that, I don't know that I fully understand what to do about that as a neighbor or as a pastor, but to say there must be something within the community like some gift or strength or accessing that helps them endure that kind of trauma when they cannot reach out for help.(31:44):My brother also told me the other day, he's an ER doctor. He's like, man, the county ER is so empty right now because people go to the county hospital for services when they don't have insurance. And many, many of them are Asian, south Asian, Latino, and African immigrants, and now they're not going or Ukrainian or Russian or whatever. So now it's emptiness and churches. Some of our churches are used to be 300 people now. There's like 40 people on a Sunday. So the reporting that I'm hearing from, whether it's the hospitals or just the stores, if you drive down our street, it's like empty nest. It is never empty. There's always people walking around on the street, whole family is going grocery shopping now. There's just nobody out. It's like a ghost town. Nobody's leaving unless they have to leave. And so it changes the feel of a community. It changes the environment. People that need access to healthcare aren't going for their follow-up appointments or their treatments because they're afraid to go to the hospital. People that would normally go to law enforcement if there's domestic violence or something happening, which already would feel very, very difficult to do, are unwilling to do it because they're afraid to leave and afraid to report to any law enforcement. Even in a sanctuary city.(33:18):I don't know what's happening to these families that aren't going to school. I'm assuming that the school has some kind of e-learning doing for them or some kind of packets they're making for the kids in the meantime while they're missing school. But there's all these things that daily rhythms of life that aren't happening. And so for many of us are like, I don't feel like going to church today. Oh, well, I feel like I'm many Sundays. I don't feel like going to church for other people, the privilege of attending worship in a congregational setting is something they'd love to have that they just can't access anymore. And so there's all these things that have changed about our daily reality that I don't know if we're going to fully understand how that's impacted us until years from now. We just don't see an end to it. We're not sure when this is going to end.Danielle (34:13):I have a flurry of thoughts going through my mind as you're speaking. One is when I did a consult with my analyst that I consult with, and we were talking about anxiety around different things with clients, and she was like, well, that's not anxiety, that's terror. And this person should feel terror because that's the reality.(34:45):That's not a pathology. So that's number one just in the therapy world, we don't want to pathologize people for feeling this terror in their bodies when that's actually the appropriate response. When immigration is sitting outside on your street, you should feel terror. Your body's giving you the appropriate warning signal. So I think about just even the shortcomings of Western psychological frameworks to address what's happening. We can't pathologize. It's not about prescribing enough medication. It's not about that. I do think you're right. I think there's some sense of, I've even felt it in my own body as you talk, a sense of, I'm going to engage what Sandra's saying and I'm also going to separate myself just enough in case that happens in Seattle so I can be just distant enough. So I got to get up, I got to eat. I got to feed my kids, I got to make sure everything's happening, got to go to work.(35:40):So I can almost feel it happening. As you describe it, we call it dissociation in psychology world, but in my analyst world, she would call it a psychic retreat, which I really like. Your psyche is kind of in a battle. You might come back from the front line to preserve yourself. And that's kind of how I think of the collective mentality a bit come back from the front lines in certain ways. So you could preserve, I need to eat, I need to sleep, I need to drink some water. I need to breathe air. So that's one thing I'm thinking about that's maybe collectively happening on multiple levels. The other thing I'm thinking about is if you're listening to this and you're in a body, even mine, a same as you, like a light-skinned Latina, white Latina, and our family has a lot of mixed identities and statuses, but if you're not in one of these situations, you can help mental health by going out and getting shit done.Sandra (36:50):Yes, absolutely. Get it done, get it done, get it done. It's like show up, put yourself. I think that's half the battle is how do we show up in spaces? I think white folks have to ask themselves. That's why all the protests, it's like, yes, it's diverse, but it's a whole lot of white people.The reason is because a lot of black folks, brown folks, vulnerable folks, we're not going to put ourselves in a position where we can have an encounter with law enforcement. So one of the things I have to say, talking about church, one of the things our pastor said the Sunday before, not the No Kings, but the immigration protest, it was like maybe a month ago, he said, listen, some of us should not be at that protest because we have a record, because we are prone to be maybe, what is it called? Oh my gosh, we're prone to be singled out by the police. We should not be there. We should pray. We should stay at home. We should host people when they come back and feed them. We should not be there. Others of us, we should be there. And you know who you are.(37:55):And so I think that's part of the discernment, which I think that's literally, it's half the conversations I'm having with people is should my children go to this protest? I fully intended to go to the No Kings protest with my full family, all of us. And I also saw these amazing alternatives like a rally for families and children. And so all these parks all over the city of Chicago, which again, were an amazing city, they had all these alternatives for if your child, someone in your family does not do crowds well, right? You're immunocompromised or you have anxiety, or I thought about, oh, maybe we shouldn't take my son to this protest. Maybe he's going to actually get an anxiety attack. Maybe we should go to this. So we had all those options till the very last minute we're decided to go to Kids Rally, but there were options for us to show up.(38:43):So when you can show up, show up if your neighborhood, there's a ton of activities in, I hope other cities are doing this too, but they're packing these little zines and these little whistles and they're telling people what to do. It's like, okay, now there's this Instagram blast about, oh, the ice is over here, and everyone shows up in their cars and they all honk their horn. You can show up in a neighborhood, honk your horn, you can blow a whistle. And we're fully intending to give away free whistles for every person that buys. The people are not a legal t-shirt for chasing justice. We're like, have a whistle. Get ready. If anything, even if you never blow that whistle, no ice in your town, you're trying to show people that I'm prepared. I'm prepared to raise my voice for you. I'm prepared to show up for you.(39:34):And so it ends up being maybe an artifact or a symbol of our willingness to ally if the time should come. But yeah, some of us, we have more privilege and showing up because I definitely have two lawyers in my speed dial right now because my husband knows that I'm prone to show up in spaces and say things that maybe will get me in trouble. So we had a meeting with a lawyer three weeks ago. He's like, please tell me what to do if my wife gets arrested or if something happens to a neighbor or he's just prepared our community block club emails and texts and signal threads. We have rapid response ready things that are rapid response. So it's like, Hey, where do you see something? I see this is the license plate. Here's a video. I saw just even informing people and praying alongside of one another.(40:29):So we have this group of pastors we gather called Pastors Rabbis and Imams called Faith Over Fear. And so in this group, someone posted like, look at Ice was heavily in our neighborhood. They said arrests that were made or the people that were detained. This is the situation, let people know. So we're just letting people know this is what's happening. Teaching people to use their phones to record everything and anything they can always being ready to show up. So I'm the type of neighbor that would anyway, if I would see law enforcement pulling over a young black or brown man, I would pull the car over and I would get out of my car and I would say, hi, I am Reverend Sandra and I'm here. I live down the street. I'm wondering if everything's okay. Here is everything. And the reason is just to show them that I'm watching. They said, no, everything's fine. I said, okay, I'm just going to sit in my car. Let me know if you need something because I'm letting them know that I'm watching.(41:37):And so I think part of it is the accountability of a community. And I love to see the walking school buses, the ride shares that parents are doing the grocery dropoffs because you can't stand in the food pantry line anymore. The GoFundMe's for particular legal fees, the trying to utilize your networks to find out if you can figure out what district or what holding location you, your loved one would be in offering mental health services. Like, Hey, here are the three organizations that do group therapy or circles or there's going to be a meditation and yoga thing offered at this center. A lot of them have a lot of embodied practices too. So I think those things are great. But yeah, we still have to, we're still living life. We're still submitting book reports for school, we're still having birthday parties and christenings, we're we still black and brown communities have been living through trauma for so long, they can't stop living.(42:53):So the question is how do we invite one another to more wholeness in our living, within our own communities, and then how do we help one another? This is affecting everybody. It's affecting not only Latino communities and not only Asian immigrant communities, but it's also affecting black communities because there's more enforcement and they're not more law enforcement and they're not necessarily targeting black communities, but where there are brown communities, sometimes there are black folks also. And so it's impacting them in just the militarization of our city. I mean, everywhere you go, there's just people marching with weapons and it could be Michigan Avenue in the shopping area downtown near the Bean, or it could be in our communities. And so I think how people are trying to, I think a city like Chicago, because it's got such a rich tradition of community organizing and community development and advocacy, I think it's very set up for what can I do in my world for my neighbors?(44:08):And then for those of you that aren't in Chicago, I think knowing which organizations are doing fantastic things, I think that's really helpful. Within the faith and justice space, I think organizations like New Life Centers that are kind of spearheading some of the new neighbors initiatives already, but they're doing this whole care system for, they're already new neighbors from Venezuela, Ecuador, and Central America who are now more vulnerable. And so they have systems in place for that. There are organizations live free Illinois who are doing more of the advocacy, raising awareness stuff. I can give you a couple, I can put in the show notes, but I think there's organizations that are doing fantastic work. Some people are just, I have a friend who's in Houston who's just like, there's a refugee family who's vulnerable right now and I need to take them groceries. Who wants to give Venmo?(45:06):Me? I think you have to trust your friends aren't going to go out for a nice rooftop beverage and 300, $400 later. Then there's groceries for this. So it's like you may not know anyone, but you may know someone who knows someone who's vulnerable. And so maybe you just are giving money to, or maybe you, I've had people send me money and be like, Hey, maybe someone who needs something. And I'm like, great. And we little, we put it cash and we put it in our car and when we need it, we help a neighbor who's in need. I think I'm calling our friends to, another one I thought of was calling our friend, inviting our friends to action. So sometimes I don't think it's that we don't want to do anything or that we're unwilling to do something. It's that we just feel so stunned. So that news that came out this week in Houston about the 15-year-old autistic boy who was taken by ICE and who has the capacity of a 4-year-old, and I was thinking about him all day long. So I just started pinging all of my friends in Houston and Austin and Dallas. I was like, anybody in Texas? I have a lot of friends in Texas. I'm like, not just, Hey Texas, do something directly. Sending it to them and saying, what have you done?(46:28):Is there a number you can call? Can you gather your small group? They're always asking, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to, I'm like, so I was like, I have something for you to do, and it's in Texas. I'm like, do you know what's happened to this kid? Is he back at home? Can you do something? Is there a GoFundMe for the parents? So I think when we're activated in small things, we develop the discipline of just being activated in general. So it's like if there's a thing that somebody invites you to give to and you give to it, then you get into the practice of giving.(47:06):If you don't start well, then where is it going to happen? So we're thinking right now, I dunno about you guys, but there's nothing in me that wants to do anything fancy right now. I rest for sure. We went to Michigan, we walked around, we took hikes. It was great. It was super free because we stayed with a friend. But there's nothing in me that's like, let me just plan a fancy vacation right now. It's not in me. And I think part of it is, it's almost like a detoxing from an American consumeristic way of seeing celebration and rests. I don't need fancy things to have rest. I don't need, doesn't have to be expensive. I don't know who came up with this. And I think it's a sensibility in us right now, and I've talked to a couple of friends about it, but it's like it's a sensibility in us that feels like it's really tone deaf to start spending a whole lot of money right now when there are so many needs in the world. And no, we can't give away our whole salaries, but we might be able to give more. For example, I don't think our friend should be saying, Hey, my son can't go to college this year. He needs $6,000. I think somebody in our friend groups could be like, actually, I am getting a bonus of $12,000. I'm going to give you three. We should be able to do that for those of us that have access.(48:27):And there are many people who have access, many other people who think they don't have money, but they do. And I think if we invite each other to say, Hey, I want to give to this person's legal fees, or I want to give to this person's college fund, or I want to give to will you give with me? And we are practicing then the kind of mutual aid that's collective that I know our grandparents did for the Latino culture, it's like the RIA system where y'all put the money in every month and every Monday the month. So it's like Koreans do it too. It's like everybody gives a hundred dollars a month and all goes into this pile and every month that pile of money moves around. So it's like our way of providing, I think there's a lot more we could be doing with our money that would give integrity to our voice. And I see a lot of talking and not a lot of sharing.Danielle (49:34):It's so true. It's a lot of talking and it's like, I think we have to get over that old white supremacy norm. If you see somebody on the street, you got to buy them food. You can't ever give them cash. That story rings through my mind as a child and just sometimes you just got to load up the cash, send someone cash for dinner and send someone cash for, I don't know, whatever they need, a bus fare or an airplane ticket or find the miles in your community if someone needs to fly somewhere. Just all these things you're talking about, we kind of have to just get over the hump and just say, Hey, people need help. Let's just go help.Sandra (50:12):And for some of us, I think it's particularly of those of us within our community that are no longer congregating at a local church. I don't know. Did you think the tithe justI think the call to generosity is still there. Whether you want to call your church a local formal traditional church or not, I would hate, I would've hated in our season that we were churchless to have stopped giving out would've been a significant amount of money that would've stopped going out. We still got salaries that year. Well, at least Carl did. Carl got a salary. So I'm like that invitation to generosity, at least at the bare minimum, at the bare minimum, 10% at the bare minimum that should be going out. And so the question is, what did all of us that left churches do with our 10% not to be legalistic because really we should be giving more. The question is, what am I allowed to keep? And for people making six figures, you need to be asking yourselves, why do you need six figures if you don't? Because most of the people, even in places like Seattle and Chicago, are living off of $50,000 a year. So I think as much as we need to ask our government to do well and be integrous in their budget, I think we need to think about that as a place of, and I say that not because I think it's going to solve the problems in Chicago, but I think that money does actually sharing does actually help some people. They haven't eaten.(52:06):They just haven't eaten. We know families whose kids don't eat.Jenny (52:19):Just thank you. It's been really important and meaningful to have your voice and your call to action and to community. I don't take lightly sharing your story and how it's specifically showing up in your community and in your own body and in your own mothering. So thank you for speaking to how you are practicing resilience and how we can think more about how to practice that collectively. It's been really, really good to be here. I am sorry I have to jump off, but thank you Danielle. I'll see you all soon.Sandra (53:23):Yeah, I mean even if you were to think about, you may not be able to provide for anyone, but is there someone in your ecosystem, in your friend group that could really use four sessions of therapy that doesn't have the finances to do so? Or that could really use sessions of acupuncture or massage therapy that doesn't have the money for it, it doesn't have insurance, and of someone who's willing to work with you on that as far as providing that for them. So I think even at that level, it's like if we had to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and say, well, what I want for someone, how would I want for someone to help me without me asking them? I think that is the biggest thing is we cannot, I don't believe we can rely on a person's ability to say what they need.(54:27):I mean, you've had stuff happen in your life. I've had health issues in my own family and problems with my family, and when people are like, oh, how can I help? I'm like, I can't think about that right now. But if a plant shows up at my house that is bringing me joy. Someone just sent me a prayer plant the other day. It's literally called a red prayer plant or something. I was like, yes, I love this. Or if someone buys dinner for my family so I don't have to cook for them, I can't stand up right now. Or if someone said, looks in on me and says, Hey, I know you guys can't be out and about much, so I just wanted to give you some funding for a streaming service. Here you go. Whatever they use it for, that's up to them. But I think to let someone know that you're thinking about them, I think is easy to do with baking something for them, sharing something with them, taking their kids for a few hours.(55:31):Because what if they just need a break from their children and maybe you could just watch their kids for a little bit, pick them up, take them to your house, watch them for a little bit. So I think there are ways that we can practically help each other that again, will make a world of difference to the person that's there next to you. And as always, calling your senators, writing letters, joining in on different campaigns that organizations are doing for around advocacy, checking in with your local city officials and your parent teacher and your schools, and figuring out what are we doing for the kids in our school even to be informed as a neighbor, what is it that our school's doing to protect our families and children? I think those are all good questions that we should always be doing and praying for people and praying specifically. We do that as a family. I think sometimes I don't know what else to do, but to say God to help.Danielle (56:35):Yeah, I mean, I have to go now, but I do think that's kind of key is not that God isn't going to intervene at some point practically, I think we are that active prayer answer for other people we're that answer. I'm not saying we're God, but we're the right. Yeah. Yeah. And just to step into that, be that answer, step into loving when it says, love your neighbor actually doing it and actually showing up and maybe loving your neighbor isn't bringing them dinner. Maybe it's just sitting down and listening to how their day went. Maybe you're not a therapist, maybe you're just a friend. Maybe you're just a community member, but you can sit in and you can hear how rough it was for that day and not take up your own space emotionally, but just be there to listen and then give them a hug and hang or leave. There's a lot of ways to show up and yeah, I'm challenged and want to do this more, so thank you. You'reSandra (57:36):Welcome. Thanks for having me.  Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Vanessa Ogaldez, LAMFTSPECIALTIES:TraumaCouples CommunicationIdentity/Self Acceptancehttps://www.dcctherapy.com/vanessa-ogaldez-lamftFrom Her website: Maybe you have said something like, “What else can I do?” and it is possible you feel stuck or heartbroken because you can't seem to connect with your partner as you want or used to. Whether or not you're in a relationship and you have experienced trauma, hurtful arguments, or life changes that have brought on disconnection in your relationships, there is a sense of loss and heartache. You may find yourself in “robot mode” just going through your daily tasks, causing you to eventually disconnect from others, only to continue the cycle of miscommunication and loneliness. Perhaps you feel misunderstood, and you compensate by being helpful to everyone else while you yearn for true intimacy and friendships. Sometimes you feel there are so many experiences that have contributed to your pain and suffering that you don't know where to start. There are Cultural norms you may feel that not everyone can understand and therapy is not one of those Cultural norms. I believe therapy can be a place of safety, healing, and self-discovery. As a therapist, my focus is to support you and your goals in life and relationships. I am committed to you building deep communications, connections and feeling secure in the ability to share your emotions.Danielle (00:06):Good morning. I just had the privilege and honor of interviewing my colleague, another therapist and mental health counselor in Chicago, Vanessa Les, and she is located right in the midst of Chicago with an eye and a view out of her office towards what's happening with ICE and immigration raids. I want to encourage you to listen into this episode of the Arise Podcast, firsthand witness accounts and what is it actually like to try to engage in a healing process when the trauma may be committed right before someone comes in the office. We know that's a possibility and right after they leave the office, not suggesting that it's right outside the door, but essentially that the world in which we are living is not as hopeful and as Mary as we would like to think, I am sad and deeply disturbed and also very hopeful that we share this power inside of ourselves.(01:10):It's based on nonviolence and care and love for neighbor, and that is why Vanessa and I connected. It's not because we're neighbors in the sense of I live next door to her in Chicago and she lives next door to me in Washington. We're neighbors because as Latinas in this world, we have a sense of great solidarity in this fight for ourselves, for our families, for our clients, to live in a world where there's freedom, expression, liberation, and a movement towards justice and away from systems and oppression that want to literally drag us into the pit of hell. We're here to say no. We're here to stand beside one another in solidarity and do that together. I hope you join us in this conversation and I hope you find your way to jump in and offer your actual physical resources, whether it's money, whether it's walking, whether it's calling a friend, whether it's paying for someone's mental health therapy, whether it's sharing a meal with someone, sharing a coffee with someone. All these things, they're just different kinds of things that we can do, and that's not an exhaustive list.(02:28):I love my neighbor. I even want to talk to the people that don't agree with me, and I believe Vanessa feels the same way. And so this episode means a lot to me. It's very important that we pay attention to what's happening and we ground ourselves in the reality and the experiences of black and brown bodies, and we don't attempt to make them prove over and over and over what we can actually see and investigate with our own eyes. Join in. Hey, welcome Vanessa. I've only met you once in person and we follow each other online, but part of the instigation for the conversation is a conversation about what is reality. So there's so many messages being thrown at us, so many things happening in the world regarding immigration, law enforcement, even mental health fields, and I've just been having conversations with different community members and activists and finding out how do you find yourself in reality what's happening. I just first would love to hear who you are, where you're at, where you're coming from, and then we can go from there.Vanessa (03:41):Okay. Well, my name is Vanessa Valez. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. Before becoming a therapist five years ago through my license, I worked in nonprofit for over 20 years, working with families and community and addressing what is the need and what is the problem and how can we all get together. Been involved with different movements and nonprofit organizations focusing on the community in Humbolt Park and Logan Square in the inner city of Chicago. My parents are longtime activists and they've been instrumental in teaching me how to work in community and be part of community and to be empathetic and thoughtful and caring and feeling like what happens to me happens to us and what happens to us happens to me. So that's kind of the values that I come from and have always felt that were true. I'm a mom of three and my husband and I have been together for 29 years, so since we were teenagers.Thank you. But yeah, so that's a lot of just in general who I am and culturally, I come from an Afro Latina culture. I am a Puerto Rican born here, well born in New York where my family was from and they migrated from Puerto Rico, my grandparents did. And in our culture, we are African, we are indigenous, and my dad is Puerto Rican and Native American. So there's a lot in here that I am a hundred percent all of it. So I think that's the view and experience that I come from is knowing who I am and my ancestors who are very important to me.Danielle (06:04):I mean, that encompasses so much of what I think the battle is over who gets to be American and who doesn't. Right? Yeah, definitely. From your position in your job and you're in Chicago right on the ground, I think a lot of people are wondering what's really happening? What are you seeing? What's true? Can you speak to that a little bit?Vanessa (06:32):Yeah. What's really happening here is, I don't know, it's like what's really happening here? People are really scared. People are really scared. Families that are black and brown, families that are in low income situations, families that have visas, families that have green cards, families that are undocumented, all of us are really scared and concerned, and the reason is because we feel that there is power being taken from us without any kind of accountability. So I see my friends and family saying ICE is in our neighborhood, and I mean a block away from where I live, ICE is in our neighborhood, in our schools. We have to watch out. ICE is in front of our church or ICE is patrolling our neighborhood, and we have to all come together and start throwing whistles and we have to know what it is that we're supposed to do if we get interact, if we interact with ice or any kind of federal agent, which is just in itself disturbing, and we're supposed to just get up in our day and send our kids to school, and we're supposed to go to work and do the things that we're supposed to do.(08:07):So it's traumatic. This is a trauma that we are going through, and I think that it only triggers the traumas that a lot of us, black and brown people and community have been trying to get the world to listen and recognize this isn't new for us. It's just now very aggressive and very violent and going backwards instead of forward.(08:39):I think that's how I would describe what is really happening in Chicago. On the other side, I think there's this other place of, I'm kind of really proud of a lot of our people where I think it is understandable to say, you know what? It's not me or mine, or I got my papers all together, so that's really unfortunate, but it's not something that's happening in front of me. I could understand that there are some of some people who feel that way because it does feel like a survival situation. I think though there are others who are saying, no, what happens to you is happening to me too, I'm going to keep accountable to my power. And there's a lot of allies out there. There are a lot of people who are moving and saying, I'm afraid, but I'm still going to act in my fear.(09:37):And I think that's really brave. So in that way, I feel like there's this movement of bravery and a movement of we've had enough and we're going to reinvent what it is that is our response. It's not this or that. It's not extreme to extreme, but I'm going to do it in the way that I feel is right and that I feel that it's good for me to do and I can be truthful in that. And so today I'm really proud because my kids are going to be protesting and walking out of their school and I'm super, super proud and I was like, send pictures because I'm so proud of them. And so someone could say, is that doing anything? I'm like, hell yeah, doing something. It's doing something. The kids are saying, what power do we have? Not much, but whatever I have, I'm going to put that out there and I'm going to be brave and do it.(10:34):And it's important for us to support them. I feel their school does a really good job of supporting them and guiding them through this and letting us parents know, Hey, talk to your kids about this shadow to Belmont Intrinsic Charter School. But they really are doing something. And I find that in a lot of the schools around Chicago, around the Hermosa, Logan Square, Humbold Park area where I live in Humboldt Park, I find that a lot of the schools are stepping up and saying, we are on the community side of taking care of our kids and what's best for our families. So there's that happening and I want to make sure to give that. We have to see that too.Danielle (11:15):One thing you really said at the beginning really struck me. You said power without accountability. And two things I think of you see a truck, you see a law enforcement person acting without accountability. Not only does that affect you in the moment and that trauma particularly maybe even chase you, but I think it activates all the other sense and remembrances of when you didn't have power and there was no accountability. So I thought of that, but I also thought of the people perpetrating these crimes and the way it's reinforcing for inside their own body that they can do whatever they want and not have to pay attention to their own soul, not have to pay attention to their own humanity. And there's something extremely dehumanizing about repeating and repeating and normalizing that for them too. So I was, those are the two things that kind of struck me at the beginning of what you said.Vanessa (12:14):Yeah, I think what you're saying right now is I think the shock factor of it all of how could you do this and do these things and say these things and not only feel that there won't be any accountability, and I think all of us are kind of going like, who's going to keep this accountable? But I think also, how can you do that and feel okay about it? And so I think about the president that just is, I think a person who I will always shock me all the things that he's doing and saying, it shocks me and I'm glad it shocks me. It should never be normal, and I think that's important. I think sometimes with a lot of supporters of his, there's this normalcy of that's just him. He's just really meaning what he's saying or he's just kind of blunt and I like that about him. That should never be normalized. So that's shocking that you can do that. He can do that and it not be held accountable to the extent that it should be. And then for there to be this huge impact on the rest of us that he's supposed to be supporting, he's supposed to be protecting and looking out for, and then it's permissible, then it's almost supported. It's okay. This is a point of view that other people are like, I'm in supportive.(13:47):I think that sounds evil. It sounds just evil and really hard to contend with,Danielle (13:58):Which actually makes what the students do to walk out of their schools so much so profoundly resistant, so profoundly different. Walking itself is not violent kids themselves against man and masks fully. I've seen the pictures and I'm assuming they're true, fully geared up weapons at their side, tear gas, all this, and you just have kids walking. Just the stark contrast in the way they're expressing their humanity,Vanessa (14:30):Right? Yes. I think, yeah, I see that too, and I think it's shocking and to not recognize that, I think that's shocking for me when people don't recognize that what is going on with I think the cognitive process, what is going on with people in society, in American society where they look at children or people walking and they demonize it, but then they see the things and hear the things that this administration is doing and that they're seeing the things that our military is being forced to do and seeing the things that are happening with ice agents and they don't feel like there's anything wrong with it. That's just something that I'm trying to grapple with. I don't. I see it and you see it. Well, it is kind of like I don't know what to do with it.Danielle (15:34):So what do you do then when you hear what happens in your own body when you hear, oh, there's ice agents at my kid's school or we're things are on lockdown. What even happens for you in your body?Vanessa (15:48):I think what happens for me is what probably a lot of people are experiencing, which is immediate fear, immediate sorrow, immediate. I think I froze a few times thinking about it when it started happening here in Chicago more so I have a 17-year-old little brown boy, and we're tall people, so he is a big guy. He might look like a man. He is six something, six three maybe, but this is my little boy, this is my baby, and I have to send him out there every day immediately after feeling the shock and the sorrow of there's so many people in our generations. I could think of my parents, I could think of my grandparents that have fought so that my son can be in a better place and I feel like we're reverting. And so now he's going to experience something that I never want him to experience. And I feel like my husband and I have done a really great job of trying to prepare him for life with the fact that people are going to, some of them are going to see him in a different way or treat him in a different way. This is so different. The risk is so much greater because it's permissible now,(17:19):And so shock a freeze, and then I feel like life and vision for the future has halted for everybody here.(17:29):We can't have the conversation of where are we going? What is the vision of the future and how can I grow as a person? We're trying to just say, how can I get from A to Z today without getting stopped, without disappearing, without the fear completely changing my brain and changing my nervous system, and how can I find joy today? That is the big thing right now. So immediately there's this negative effect of this experience, and then there is the how can we recover and how can we stay safe? That's the big next step for us is I think people mentioned the word resilience and I feel like more people are very resilient and have historically been resilient, but it's become this four letter word. I don't want to be resilient anymore. I want to thrive. And I feel like that for my people. My community is like, why do we have to feel like we, our existence has to be surviving and this what's happening now with immigration and it's more than immigration. We know that it's not about just, oh, let's get the criminals. We know that this is targeted. There's proof out there, and the fact that we have to keep on bringing the proof up, it makes no sense. It just means if you don't believe it, then you've made a decision that you're not going to believe it. So it doesn't matter if we repeat it or not. It doesn't matter if you're right there and see it. So the fact that we have to even do the put out the energy of trying to get this message out and get people to be aware of it(19:24):Is a lot of energy on top of the fact that we're trying to survive this and there's no thriving right now. And that's the truth.Danielle (19:38):And the fact that people can say, oh, well, that's Chicago, that's not here, or that's Portland, that's not here. And the truth is it's here under the surface, the same hate, the same bigotry, the same racism, the same extreme violence. You can feel it bubbling under the surface. And we've had our own experiences here in town with that. I think. I know they've shut off funding for Pell grants.And I know that's happened. It happened to my family. So you even feel the squeeze. You feel the squeeze of you may get arrest. I've had the same talk with my very brown, curly hair, dark sun. I'm like, you can't make the mistakes other kids make. You can't walk in this place. You can't show up in this way. This is not a time where you can be you everywhere you go. You have to be careful.Vanessa (20:38):I think that's the big thing about our neighborhoods is that's the one place that maybe we could do that. That's the one place I could put my loud music on. That's the one place I could put my flags up. My Puerto Rican flags up and this is the one place that we could be. So for that to now be taken from us is a violence.Danielle (21:01):Yeah, it is a violence. I think the fact, I love that you said at the very beginning you said this, I was raised to think of what happens to me is happening to you. What happens to you is happening to me. What happens to them is happening to me and this idea of collective, but we live in a society that is forced separation, that wants to think of it separate. What enables you to stay connected to the people that love you and that are in your community? What inside of you drives that connection? What keeps you moving? I know you're not thriving, but what keeps youVanessa (21:37):Surviving? That's a good question. What keeps us surviving is I think it's honestly, I'll be really honest. It's the knowledge that I feel like I'm worth it.(21:53):I'm worth it. And I've done the work to get there. I've done the work to know my healing and to know my worth and to know my value. And in that, I feel like then I can make it My, and I have made it. My duty to do that for others is to say, you are worth it. You are so valuable. I need you and I know that you need me. And so I need to be well in order to be there for you. And that's important. I think. I see my kids, and of course they're a big motivator for me of getting up every day and trying to persevere and trying to find happiness with them and monitor their wellbeing and their mental health. And so that's a motivation. But that's me being connected with others. And so then there's family and friends that I'm connected with talking to my New York family all the time, and they're talking to me about what's going on there and them asking them what's going on there. And then we're contending with it. But then, so there's a process of crying about it, process of holding each other's hands and then process of reminding each other, we're not alone(23:12):And then processing another level of, and we can't give up. There's just too much to give up here. And so if it's going to be taken, we're going to take back our power and we're going to make it the narrative of what it's going to be, of how this fight is going to be fought. And that feels motivating. Something to do. There's just so much we've done, so much we've built(23:35):These communities have, I mean, sometimes they show the videos of ice agents and I'm like, wow, behind the scenes of the violence happening, you could see these beautiful murals. And I'm like, that's why we fight. That's why every day we get up, that's why we persevere is because we have been here. It wasn't like we just got here. We've been here and we've been doing the work and we've been building our communities. They are taking what we've grown. They're taking research from these universities. They're taking research from these young students who are out here trying to get more information so that it could better this community. So we've built so much. It's worth it. It's valuable and it's not going to be easily given.Danielle (24:29):Yeah, we have built so much. I mean, whether it's actually physically building the buildings to being involved in our schools and advocating because when we advocate just not for our rights, but in the past when we advocate for rights, I love what Cesar Chavez talks about when you're advocating for yourself, you're advocating for the other person. And so much of our advocacy is so inclusive of other people. And so I do think that there's some underestimation of our power or a lot, and I think that drives the other side mad. Literally insane.Vanessa (25:14):I think so too. I think this Saturdays protest is a big indicator of that. I know. Which you'll see me right there because what are we going to do? I mean, what are the things we can do things and we can do. And I feel like even in the moments when I am in session with a family or if I'm on a conversation with a friend, sometimes I post a lot of just what I see that I think is information that needs to get out there. And I am like somebody's going to see it and go like, oh, I didn't see that on my algorithm. And I get conversations from friends and family of, I need to talk about this. What are your thoughts about it? And I feel like that's a protest of we are going to join together in this experience and remind each other who we are in this moment and in this time. And then in that power, we can then make this narrative what we want it to be. And so it's a lot of work though. It's a lot of work and it's a lot of energy. So then it's a job right now. And I think that's why the word resilience is kind of a four letter word. Can we talk about the after effect? Because the after effect is depleted. There's just, I'm hungry. My nervous system is shot. How do I sleep? How do I eat? How do I take care and sell? soThe(26:54):A lot of work and we got to do it, but it's the truth of it. So both can exist, right? It's like how great and then how hard.Danielle (27:08):I love it that you said it's a job. It is an effing job, literally. It's like take care of your family, take care of yourself, whatever else you got going on. And then also how do you fight for your community? Because that's not something we're just going to stop doing.Literally all these extra work, all this extra work, all this extra job. And it's not like you would stop doing it, but it is extra.What do you think as jumping in back into the mental health field? And I told someone recently, they're like, oh, how's business going? I'm like, what do you mean? How's your client load? And I was like, well, sadly, the government has increased my caseload and the mental distress has actually in my profession, adds work to my plate.And I'm wondering for you what that's like. And it almost feels gross to me. Like someone out there is committing traumas that we all see, I see in the news I'm experiencing with my family, and then people need to come in more to get therapy, which is great. I'm glad we can have that process. But also, it's really gross to say your business has changed because the government is making more trauma on your people,Vanessa (28:29):Right? And I don't know if you experienced this, but I'm also feeling like there's this shift in what the sessions look like and what therapy looks like. Because it's one thing to work on past traumas or one thing to say, let's work on some of the cognitive distortions that these traumas have created and then move into vision and like, okay, well then without that, who are you and what are you and how can you move? And what would be your ideal future that you can work towards that has all halted? That's not available right now. I can't say you're not at risk. What happened to you way back is not something that's happening to you right now that it's not true. I can't tell those who are scientists and going into research, you're fine. You don't have to think about the world ending or your life as you know it ending because the life as people, their livelihoods are ending, have ended abruptly without any accountability, without any protection. It has halted. And a lot of these families I'm working with is we can't go into future that would serve me as let's go into the future. Let's do a vision board that would serve my agenda. But I'm going to be very honest with you, I have to validate the fact that there is a risk. My office is not far from Michigan Avenue. I could see it from here. My window's there, it's right out the window. I have families coming in and going, I'm afraid to come to session(30:25):Because they just grabbed somebody two years ago and no one said anything that was around them. I have no one that I can say in this environment that is going to protect me, but they come anyway because they freaking need it. And so then the sessions are that the sessions are the safe place. The only semblance of safety for them. And that's a big undertaking I think emotionally for us as therapists is how do I sit and this is happening. I don't have an answer for you on how to view this differently. It is what it is. And also this is the only safe place. I need to make sure that you're safe with the awareness. You're going to leave my office and I'm going to sit with that knowledge. So it's so different. I feel it's changed what's happening.Danielle (31:27):Oh man, I just stopped my breath thinking of that. I was consulting with a supervisor. I still meet with supervision and get consult on my cases, and I was talking about quote anxiety, and my supervisor halted me and she's like, that's not anxiety. That's the body actually saying there's a real danger right now. This is not what we talk about in class, what you studied in grad school. This is like of court. That body needs to have that level of panic to actually protect themselves from a real threat right now. And my job isn't to try to take that away.Vanessa (32:04):Right? Right. Yeah. And sometimes before that was our job, right? Of how can I bring the adult online because the child when they were powerless and felt unsafe, went through this thing. Now it's like, no, this adult is very much at risk right now when they leave this room and I have to let them say that right now and let them say whatever it is that they need to say, and I have to address it and recognize what it is that they need. How can I be supportive? It is completely mind blowing how immediate this has changed. And that in itself is also a trauma. There had not been any preparing for, we were not prepared,Danielle (32:57):Vanessa. Then even what is your nervous system? I'm assuming it goes up and it comes down and it goes, what is it like for your own nervous system to have the experience of sitting in your office see shit some bad shit then with the client, that's okay. And then you don't know what's happening. What's happening even for you in your own nervous system if you're willing to share?Vanessa (33:24):Yeah, I'm willing to share. I'm going through it with everybody else. I really am. I'm having my breakdowns and I have my therapist who's amazing and I've increased my sessions with her. My husband and I are trying to figure out how do we hold space and also keep our life going in a positive way. How do we exemplify how to deal with this thing? We're literally writing the book for our kids as we go. But for me, I find it important to let my, I feel like it's my intuition and my gut and my spirit lead more so in my sessions. There have been moments where I find it completely proper to cry with my clients, to let my tears show.(34:34):I find that healing for them to see that I am moved by what they are sharing with me, that they are not wrong to cry. They're not wrong. That this is legitimate. And so for me, that is also healing for me to let my natural disposition of connection and of care below more, and then I need to sleep and then I need to eat as healthy as possible in between sessions, food in my mouth. I need to see beauty. And so sometimes I love to see art especially. So I have a membership to the art museum, a hundred bucks a month, I mean a year. And that's my birthday gift to me every year around March. I'm like, that's for me, that's my present. And I'll go there to see the historical art and go to the Mexican art museum, which is be beautiful. I mean, I love it. And that one, they don't even charge you admission. You give a donation to see the art feels like I am connecting with those who've come before me and that have in the midst of their hardships, they've created and built,(36:06):And then I feel more grounded. But it isn't every day. There are days and I am not well, and I'll be really honest with that. And then I have to tell my beautiful aunt in New York, I'm not doing good today. And then she pours into me and she does that. She'll do that with me too. Hey, I'm the little niece. I ain't doing all right. Then I pour into her. So it's a lot of back and forth. But like I said before, I've done the work. I remember someone, I think it was Sandra, in fact, I think Sandra, she said to me one time, Vanessa sleeping is holy.Like, what? Completely changed my mind. Yeah, you don't have to go into zero. You don't have to get all the way depleted. It's wholly for you to recover. So I'm trying to keep that in mind in the midst of all of this. And I feel like it's done me well. It's done me really good So far. I've been really working hard on it.Danielle (37:19):I just take a big breath because it isn't, I think what you highlight, and that's what's good for people to know is even as therapists, even as leaders in our communities, we have to still do all these little things that are necessary for our bodies to keep moving. You said sleep, eat the first one. Yeah, 1 0 1. And I just remember someone inviting me to do something recently and I was just like, no, I'm busy. But really I just needed to go to bed and that was my busy, just having to put my head down. And that feeling of when I have that feeling like I can put my head down and close my eyes and I know there's no immediate responsibility for me at my house. That's when I feel the day kind of shed a bit, the burden kind of lessens or the heightened activity lessens. Even if something comes up, it's just less in that moment.Vanessa (38:28):Yes, I agree. Yeah, I think those weekends are holy for me. And keeping boundaries around all of this has been helpful. What you're saying, and no thank you. Next, I'll get you next time. And not having to explain, but taking care of yourself. Yeah. So importantDanielle (38:51):Vanessa. So we're out here in Washington, you're over there in Chicago, and there's a lot of folks, I think in different places in this United States and maybe elsewhere that listen and they want to know what can they do to support, what can they do to jump on board? Is there practical things that we can do for folks that have been invaded? Are there ways we can help from here? I'm assuming prayers necessary, but I tell people lately, I'm like, prayer better also be an action or I don't want it. So what in your imagination are the options? And I know they might be infinity, but just from your perspective.Vanessa (39:36):Yeah, what comes to mind I think is pray before you act. Like you just said, for guidance and honestly, calling every nonprofit organization that's within the black and brown community right now and saying, what is it that you need? I think that would be a no-brainer for me. And providing that. So if they're like, we need money. Give that money. We need bodies, we need people, volunteers to do this work, then doing that. And if they need anything that you can provide, then you're doing that. But I think a lot of times we ask the question, what do you need? And that makes the other person have to do work to figure out to help you to get somewhere. And so even though it comes from a very thoughtfulI would say maybe go into your coffers and say, what can I give before you ask the question? Because maybe just offering without even there being a need might be what you just got to do. So go into your coffers and say, what do I have that I can give? What is it that I want to do? How do I want to show up? Asking that question is the first thing to then lead to connecting in action. So I think that that might be my suggestion and moving forward.Danielle (41:05):One thing I was thinking of, if people have spare money, sometimes I think you can go to someone and just pay for their therapy.Vanessa (41:23):Agree. Yeah. Offer free therapy. If you are a licensed therapist in another city, you have colleagues that are in the cities that you want to connect with and maybe saying, can I pay for people that want therapy and may not be able to afford it? Maybe people who their insurance has been cut, or maybe people who have lost income. If there's anybody, please let me know. And I want to send that money to them to pay for that, and they don't have to know who I am. I think that's a beautiful way of community stepping up for each other.Danielle (41:59):The other thing I think of never underestimate the power of cash. And I know it's kind of demonized sometimes, like, oh, you got to give resources. But I find just sending people when you can, 20, 15, 30, 40 bucks of people on the ground, those people that really love and care about their community will put that money to good use. And you don't actually need a receipt on what it went for.So Vanessa, how can people get ahold of you or find out more about you? Do you write? Do you do talks? Tell me.Vanessa (42:39):Yeah, like I said, I am busy, so I want to do all of those things where I'm not doing those things now, but people can contact me through the practice that I work in the website, and that is deeper connections counseling. And my email is vanessa@dcctherapy.com. And in any way that anybody wants to connect with me, they can do that there.  Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

BIO:The Reverend Dr. Starlette Thomas is a poet, practical theologian, and itinerant prophet for a coming undivided “kin-dom.” She is the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, named for her work and witness and an associate editor at Good Faith Media. Starlette regularly writes on the sociopolitical construct of race and its longstanding membership in the North American church. Her writings have been featured in Sojourners, Red Letter Christians, Free Black Thought, Word & Way, Plough, Baptist News Global and Nurturing Faith Journal among others. She is a frequent guest on podcasts and has her own. The Raceless Gospel podcast takes her listeners to a virtual church service where she and her guests tackle that taboo trinity— race, religion, and politics. Starlette is also an activist who bears witness against police brutality and most recently the cultural erasure of the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. It was erected in memory of the 2020 protests that brought the world together through this shared declaration of somebodiness after the gruesome murder of George Perry Floyd, Jr. Her act of resistance caught the attention of the Associated Press. An image of her reclaiming the rubble went viral and in May, she was featured in a CNN article.Starlette has spoken before the World Council of Churches North America and the United Methodist Church's Council of Bishops on the color- coded caste system of race and its abolition. She has also authored and presented papers to the members of the Baptist World Alliance in Zurich, Switzerland and Nassau, Bahamas to this end. She has cast a vision for the future of religion at the National Museum of African American History and Culture's “Forward Conference: Religions Envisioning Change.” Her paper was titled “Press Forward: A Raceless Gospel for Ex- Colored People Who Have Lost Faith in White Supremacy.” She has lectured at The Queen's Foundation in Birmingham, U.K. on a baptismal pedagogy for antiracist theological education, leadership and ministries. Starlette's research interests have been supported by the Louisville Institute and the Lilly Foundation. Examining the work of the Reverend Dr. Clarence Jordan, whose farm turned “demonstration plot” in Americus, Georgia refused to agree to the social arrangements of segregation because of his Christian convictions, Starlette now takes this dirt to the church. Her thesis is titled, “Afraid of Koinonia: How life on this farm reveals the fear of Christian community.” A full circle moment, she was recently invited to write the introduction to Jordan's newest collection of writings, The Inconvenient Gospel: A Southern Prophet Tackles War, Wealth, Race and Religion.Starlette is a member of the Christian Community Development Association, the Peace & Justice Studies Association, and the Koinonia Advisory Council. A womanist in ministry, she has served as a pastor as well as a denominational leader. An unrepentant academician and bibliophile, Starlette holds degrees from Buffalo State College, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and Wesley Theological Seminary. Last year, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in Sacred Theology for her work and witness as a public theologian from Wayland Baptist Theological Seminary. She is the author of "Take Me to the Water": The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church and a contributing author of the book Faith Forward: A Dialogue on Children, Youth & a New Kind of Christianity.  JennyI was just saying that I've been thinking a lot about the distinction between Christianity and Christian supremacy and Christian nationalism, and I have been researching Christian nationalism for probably about five or six years now. And one of my introductions to the concept of it was a book that's based on a documentary that's based on a book called Constantine Sword. And it talked about how prior to Constantine, Christians had the image of fish and life and fertility, and that is what they lived by. And then Constantine supposedly had this vision of a cross and it said, with this sign, you shall reign. And he married the church and the state. And ever since then, there's been this snowball effect of Christian empire through the Crusades, through manifest destiny, through all of these things that we're seeing play out in the United States now that aren't new. But I think there's something new about how it's playing out right now.Danielle (02:15):I was thinking about the doctrine of discovery and how that was the creation of that legal framework and ideology to justify the seizure of indigenous lands and the subjugation of indigenous peoples. And just how part of that doctrine you have to necessarily make the quote, humans that exist there, you have to make them vacant. Or even though they're a body, you have to see them as internally maybe empty or lacking or less. And that really becomes this frame. Well, a repeated frame.Jenny (03:08):Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And it feels like that's so much source to that when that dehumanization is ordained by God. If God is saying these people who we're not even going to look at as people, we're going to look at as objects, how do we get out of that?Danielle (03:39):I don't know. Well, definitely still in it. You can hear folks like Charlie Kirk talk about it and unabashedly, unashamedly turning point USA talk about doctrine of discovery brings me currently to these fishing boats that have been jetting around Venezuela. And regardless of what they're doing, the idea that you could just kill them regardless of international law, regardless of the United States law, which supposedly we have the right to a process, the right to due process, the right to show up in a court and we're presumed innocent. But this doctrine applies to people manifest destiny, this doctrine of discovery. It applies to others that we don't see as human and therefore can snuff out life. And I think now they're saying on that first boat, I think they've blown up four boats total. And on the first boat, one of the ladies is speaking out, saying they were out fishing and the size of the boat. I think that's where you get into reality. The size of the boat doesn't indicate a large drug seizure anyway. It's outside reality. And again, what do you do if they're smuggling humans? Did you just destroy all that human life? Or maybe they're just fishing. So I guess that doctrine and that destiny, it covers all of these immoral acts, it kind of washes them clean. And I guess that talking about Constantine, it feels like the empire needed a way to do that, to absolve themselves.Danielle (05:40):I know it gives me both comfort and makes me feel depressed when I think about people in 300 ad being, they're freaking throwing people into the lion's den again and people are cheering. And I have to believe that there were humans at that time that saw the barbarism for what it was. And that gives me hope that there have always been a few people in a system of tyranny and oppression that are like, what the heck is going on? And it makes me feel like, ugh. When does that get to be more than just the few people in a society kind of society? Or what does a society need to not need such violence? Because I think it's so baked in now to these white and Christian supremacy, and I don't know, in my mind, I don't think I can separate white supremacy from Christian supremacy because even before White was used as a legal term to own people and be able to vote, the legal term was Christian. And then when enslaved folks started converting to Christianity, they pivoted and said, well, no, not all Christians. It has to be white Christians. And so I think white supremacy was birthed out of a long history of Christian supremacy.Danielle (07:21):Yeah, it's weird. I remember growing up, and maybe you had this experience too, I remember when Schindler's List hit the theaters and you were probably too young, but Schindler's listed the theaters, and I remember sitting in a living room and having to convince my parents of why I wanted to see it. And I think I was 16, I don't remember. I was young and it was rated R and of course that was against our values to see rated R movies. But I really wanted to see this movie. And I talked and talked and talked and got to see this movie if anybody's watched Schindler's List, it's a story of a man who is out to make money, sees this opportunity to get free labor basically as part of the Nazi regime. And so he starts making trades to access free labor, meanwhile, still has women, enjoys a fine life, goes to church, has a pseudo faith, and as time goes along, I'm shortening the story, but he gets this accountant who he discovers he loves because his accountant makes him rich. He makes him rich off the labor. But the accountant is thinking, how do I save more lives and get them into this business with Schindler? Well, eventually they get captured, they get found out. All these things happen, right, that we know. And it becomes clear to Schindler that they're exterminating, they're wiping out an entire population.(09:01):I guess I come to that and just think about, as a young child, I remember watching that thinking, there's no way this would ever happen again because there's film, there's documentation. At the time, there were people alive from the Great war, the greatest generation like my grandfather who fought in World War ii. There were other people, we had the live stories. But now just a decade, 12, 13 years removed, it hasn't actually been that long. And the memory of watching a movie like Schindler's List, the impact of seeing what it costs a soul to take the life of other souls like that, that feels so far removed now. And that's what the malaise of the doctrine of Discovery and manifest destiny, I think have been doing since Constantine and Christianity. They've been able to wipe the memory, the historical memory of the evil done with their blessing.(10:06):And I feel like even this huge thing like the Holocaust, the memories being wiped, you can almost feel it. And in fact, people are saying, I don't know if they actually did that. I don't know if they killed all these Jewish peoples. Now you hear more denial even of the Holocaust now that those storytellers aren't passed on to the next life. So I think we are watching in real time how Christianity and Constantine were able to just wipe use empire to wipe the memory of the people so they can continue to gain riches or continue to commit atrocities without impunity just at any level. I guess that's what comes to mind.Jenny (10:55):Yeah, it makes me think of, I saw this video yesterday and I can't remember what representative it was in a hearing and she had written down a long speech or something that she was going to give, and then she heard during the trial the case what was happening was someone shared that there have been children whose parents have been abducted and disappeared because the children were asked at school, are your parents undocumented? And she said, I can't share what I had prepared because I'm caught with that because my grandfather was killed in the Holocaust because his children were asked at school, are your parents Jewish?(11:53):And my aunt took that guilt with her to her grave. And the amount of intergenerational transgenerational trauma that is happening right now, that never again is now what we are doing to families, what we are doing to people, what we are doing to children, the atrocities that are taking place in our country. Yeah, it's here. And I think it's that malaise has come over not only the past, but even current. I think people don't even know how to sit with the reality of the horror of what's happening. And so they just dissociate and they just check out and they don't engage the substance of what's happening.Danielle (13:08):Yeah. I tell a friend sometimes when I talk to her, I just say, I need you to tap in. Can you just tap in? Can you just carry the conversation or can you just understand? And I don't mean understand, believe a story. I mean feel the story. It's one thing to say the words, but it's another thing to feel them. And I think Constantine is a brilliant guy. He took a peaceful religion. He took a peaceful faith practice, people that literally the prior guy was throwing to the lions for sport. He took a people that had been mocked, a religious group that had been mocked, and he elevated them and then reunified them with that sword that you're talking about. And so what did those Christians have to give up then to marry themselves to empire? I don't know, but it seems like they kind of effed us over for eternity, right?Jenny (14:12):Yeah. Well, and I think that that's part of it. I think part of the malaise is the infatuation with eternity and with heaven. And I know for myself, when I was a missionary for many years, I didn't care about my body because this body, this light and momentary suffering paled in comparison to what was awaiting me. And so no matter what happened, it was a means to an end to spend eternity with Jesus. And so I think of empathy as us being able to feel something of ourselves in someone else. If I don't have grief and joy and sorrow and value for this body, I'm certainly not going to have it for other bodies. And I think the disembodiment of white Christian supremacy is what enables bodies to just tolerate and not consider the brutality of what we're seeing in the United States. What we're seeing in Congo, what we're seeing in Palestine, what we're seeing everywhere is still this sense of, oh, the ends are going to justify the means we're all going to, at least I'll be in heaven and everyone else can kind of figure out what they're going to do.I don't know, man. Yeah, maybe. I guess when you think about Christian nationalism versus maybe a more authentic faith, what separates them for youAbiding by the example that Jesus gave or not. I mean, Jesus was killed by the state because he had some very unpopular things to say about the state and the way in which he lived was very much like, how do I see those who are most oppressed and align myself with them? Whereas Christian nationalism is how do I see those who have the most power and align myselves with them?(16:48):And I think it is a question of alignment and orientation. And at the end of the day, who am I going to stand with even knowing and probably knowing that that may be to the detriment of my own body, but I do that not out of a sense of martyrdom, but out of a sense of integrity. I refuse. I think I really believe Jesus' words when he said, what good is it for a man to gain the world and lose his soul? And at the end of the day, what I'm fighting for is my own soul, and I don't want to give that up.Danielle (17:31):Hey, starlet, we're on to not giving up our souls to power.The Reverend Dr.Rev. Dr. Starlette (17:47):I'm sorry I'm jumping from one call to the next. I do apologize for my tardiness now, where were we?Danielle (17:53):We got on the subject of Constantine and how he married the sword with Christianity when it had been fish and fertile ground and et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, that's where we started. Yeah, that's where we started.Starlette (18:12):I'm going to get in where I fit in. Y'all keep going.Danielle (18:14):You get in. Yeah, you get in. I guess Jenny, for me and for you, starlet, the deep erasure of any sort of resemblance of I have to look back and I have to be willing to interrogate, I think, which is what a lot of people don't want to do. I grew up in a really conservative evangelical family and a household, and I have to interrogate, well, one, why did my mom get into that? Because Mexican, and number two, I watched so slowly as there was a celebration. I think it was after Bill Clinton had this Monica Lewinsky thing and all of this stuff happened. My Latino relatives were like, wait a minute, we don't like that. We don't like that. That doesn't match our values. And I remember this celebration of maybe now they're going to become Christians. I remember thinking that as a child, because for them to be a Democrat in my household and for them to hold different values around social issues meant that they weren't necessarily saved in my house and my way because they hadn't fully bought into empire in the way I know Jenny muted herself.(19:31):They hadn't fully bought into empire. And I slowly watched those family members in California kind of give way to conservatism the things that beckoned it. And honestly, a lot of it was married to religion and to what is going on today and not standing up for justice, not standing up for civil rights. I watched the movement go over, and it feels like at the expense of the memory of my grandfather and my great-grandfather who despised religion in some ways, my grandfather did not like going to church because he thought people were fake. He didn't believe them, and he didn't see what church had to do with being saved anyway. And so I think about him a lot and I think, oh, I got to hold onto that a little bit in the face of empire. But yeah, my mind just went off on that rabbit trail.Starlette (20:38):Oh, it's quite all right. My grandfather had similar convictions. My grandmother took the children to church with her and he stayed back. And after a while, the children were to decide that they didn't want to go anymore. And I remember him saying, that's enough. That's enough. You've done enough. They've heard enough. Don't make them go. But I think he drew some of the same conclusions, and I hold those as well, but I didn't grow up in a household where politics was even discussed. Folks were rapture ready, as they say, because they were kingdom minded is what they say now. And so there was no discussion of what was going on on the ground. They were really out of touch with, I'm sending right now. They were out of touch with reality. I have on pants, I have on full makeup, I have on earrings. I'm not dressed modestly in any way, shape, fashion or form.(21:23):It was a very externalized, visible, able to be observed kind of spirituality. And so I enter the spaces back at home and it's like going into a different world. I had to step back a bit and oftentimes I just don't say anything. I just let the room have it because you can't, in my experience, you can't talk 'em out of it. They have this future orientation where they live with their feet off the ground because Jesus is just around the corner. He's right in that next cloud. He's coming, and so none of this matters. And so that affected their political participation and discussion. There was certainly very minor activism, so I wasn't prepared by family members to show up in the streets like I do now. I feel sincerely called. I feel like it's a work of the spirit that I know where to put my feet at all, but I certainly resonate with what you would call a rant that led you down to a rabbit hole because it led me to a story about my grandfather, so I thank you for that. They were both right by the way,Danielle (22:23):I think so he had it right. He would sit in the very back of church sometimes to please my grandmother and to please my family, and he didn't have a cell phone, but he would sit there and go to sleep. He would take a nap. And I have to think of that now as resistance. And as a kid I was like, why does he do that? But his body didn't want to take it in.Starlette (22:47):That's rest as resistance from the Nat Bishop, Trisha Hersey, rest as act of defiance, rest as reparations and taking back my time that you're stealing from me by having me sit in the service. I see that.Danielle (23:02):I mean, Jenny, it seems like Constantine, he knew what to do. He gets Christians on his side, they knew how to gather organically. He then gets this mass megaphone for whatever he wants, right?Jenny (23:21):Yeah. I think about Adrian Marie Brown talks a lot about fractals and how what happens on a smaller scale is going to be replicated on larger scales. And so even though there's some sense of disjoint with denominations, I think generally in the United States, there is some common threads of that manifest destiny that have still found its way into these places of congregating. And so you're having these training wheels really even within to break it down into the nuclear family that James Dobson wanted everyone to focus on was a very, very narrow white, patriarchal Christian family. And so if you rehearse this on these smaller scales, then you can rehearse it in your community, then you can rehearse it, and it just bubbles and bubbles and balloons out into what we're seeing happen, I think.Yeah, the nuclear family and then the youth movements, let us, give us your youth, give us your kids. Send us your kids and your youth to our camps.Jenny (24:46):Great. I grew up in Colorado and I was probably 10 or 11 when the Columbine shooting happened, and I remember that very viscerally. And the immediate conversation was not how do we protect kids in school? It was glorifying this one girl that maybe or maybe did not say yes when the shooters asked, do you still believe in God? And within a year her mom published a book about it. And that was the thing was let's use this to glorify martyrdom. And I think it is different. These were victims in school and I think any victim of the shooting is horrifying. And I think we're seeing a similar level of that martyrdom frenzy with Charlie Kirk right now. And what we're not talking about is how do we create a safer society? What we're talking about, I'm saying, but I dunno. What I'm hearing of the white Christian communities is how are we glorifying Charlie Kirk as a martyr and what power that wields when we have someone that we can call a martyr?Starlette (26:27):No, I just got triggered as soon as you said his name.(26:31):Just now. I think grieving a white supremacist is terrifying. Normalizing racist rhetoric is horrifying. And so I look online in disbelief. I unfollowed and blocked hundreds of people on social media based on their comments about what I didn't agree with. Everything he said, got a lot of that. I'm just not interested. I think they needed a martyr for the race war that they're amping for, and I would like to be delivered from the delusion that is white body supremacy. It is all exhausting. I don't want to be a part of the racial imagination that he represents. It is not a new narrative. We are not better for it. And he's not a better person because he's died. The great Biggie Smalls has a song that says you're nobody until somebody kills you. And I think it's appropriate. Most people did not know who he was. He was a podcaster. I'm also looking kind of cross-eyed at his wife because that's not, I served as a pastor for more than a decade. This is not an expression of grief. There's nothing like anything I've seen for someone who was assassinated, which I disagree with.(28:00):I've just not seen widows take the helm of organizations and given passion speeches and make veil threats to audiences days before the, as we would say in my community, before the body has cooled before there is a funeral that you'll go down and take pictures. That could be arguably photo ops. It's all very disturbing to me. This is a different measure of grief. I wrote about it. I don't know what, I've never heard of a sixth stage of grief that includes fighting. We're not fighting over anybody's dead body. We're not even supposed to do it with Jesus. And so I just find it all strange that before the man is buried, you've already concocted a story wherein opposing forces are at each other's throats. And it's all this intergalactic battle between good and bad and wrong, up and down, white and black. It's too much.(28:51):I think white body supremacy has gotten out of hand and it's incredibly theatrical. And for persons who have pulled back from who've decent whiteness, who've de racialize themselves, it's foolishness. Just nobody wants to be involved in this. It's a waste of time. White body supremacy and racism are wastes of time. Trying to prove that I'm a human being or you're looking right at is a waste of time. And people just want to do other things, which is why African-Americans have decided to go to sleep, to take a break. We're not getting ready to spin our wheels again, to defend our humanity, to march for rights that are innate, to demand a dignity that comes with being human. It's just asinine.(29:40):I think you would be giving more credence to the statements themselves by responding. And so I'd rather save my breath and do my makeup instead because trying to defend the fact that I'm a glorious human being made in the image of God is a waste of time. Look at me. My face is beat. It testifies for me. Who are you? Just tell me that I don't look good and that God didn't touch me. I'm with the finger of love as the people say, do you see this beat? Let me fall back. So you done got me started and I blame you. It's your fault for the question. So no, that's my response to things like that. African-American people have to insulate themselves with their senses of ness because he didn't have a kind word to say about African-American people, whether a African-American pilot who is racialized as black or an African-American woman calling us ignorance saying, we're incompetence. If there's no way we could have had these positions, when African-American women are the most agreed, we're the most educated, how dare you? And you think, I'm going to prove that I'm going to point to degrees. No, I'll just keep talking. It will make itself obvious and evident.(30:45):Is there a question in that? Just let's get out of that. It triggers me so bad. Like, oh, that he gets a holiday and it took, how many years did it take for Martin Luther King Junior to get a holiday? Oh, okay. So that's what I mean. The absurdity of it all. You're naming streets after him hasn't been dead a year. You have children coloring in sheets, doing reports on him. Hasn't been a few months yet. We couldn't do that for Martin Luther King. We couldn't do that for Rosa Parks. We couldn't do that for any other leader, this one in particular, and right now, find that to beI just think it just takes a whole lot of delusion and pride to keep puffing yourself up and saying, you're better than other people. Shut up, pipe down. Or to assume that everybody wants to look like you or wants to be racialized as white. No, I'm very cool in who I'm, I don't want to change as the people say in every lifetime, and they use these racialized terms, and so I'll use them and every lifetime I want to come back as black. I don't apologize for my existence. I love it here. I don't want to be racialized as white. I'm cool. That's the delusion for me that you think everyone wants to look like. You think I would trade.(32:13):You think I would trade for that, and it looks great on you. I love what it's doing for you. But as for me in my house, we believe in melanin and we keep it real cute over here. I just don't have time. I think African-Americans minoritized and otherwise, communities should invest their time in each other and in ourselves as opposed to wasting our breath, debating people. We can't debate white supremacists. Anyway, I think I've talked about that the arguments are not rooted in reason. It's rooted in your dehumanization and equating you with three fifths of a human being who's in charge of measurements, the demonizing of whiteness. It's deeply problematic for me because it puts them in a space of creator. How can you say how much of a human being that's someone? This stuff is absurd. And so I've refuse to waste my breath, waste my life arguing with somebody who doesn't have the power, the authority.(33:05):You don't have the eyesight to tell me if I'm human or not. This is stupid. We're going to do our work and part of our work is going to sleep. We're taking naps, we're taking breaks, we're putting our feet up. I'm going to take a nap after this conversation. We're giving ourselves a break. We're hitting the snooze button while staying woke. There's a play there. But I think it's important that people who are attacked by white body supremacy, not give it their energy. Don't feed into the madness. Don't feed into the machine because it'll eat you alive. And I didn't get dressed for that. I didn't get on this call. Look at how I look for that. So that's what that brings up. Okay. It brings up the violence of white body supremacy, the absurdity of supremacy at all. The delusion of the racial imagination, reading a 17th century creation onto a 21st century. It's just all absurd to me that anyone would continue to walk around and say, I'm better than you. I'm better than you. And I'll prove it by killing you, lynching you, raping your people, stealing your people, enslaving your people. Oh, aren't you great? That's pretty great,Jenny (34:30):I think. Yeah, I think it is. I had a therapist once tell me, it's like you've had the opposite of a psychotic break because when that is your world and that's all, it's so easy to justify and it makes sense. And then as soon as you step out of it, you're like, what the what? And then it makes it that much harder to understand. And this is my own, we talked about this last week, but processing what is my own path in this of liberation and how do I engage people who are still in that world, who are still related to me, who are, and in a way that isn't exhausting for I'm okay being exhausted if it's going to actually bear something, if it's just me spinning my wheels, I don't actually see value in that. And for me, what began to put cracks in that was people challenging my sense of superiority and my sense of knowing what they should do with their bodies. Because essentially, I think a lot of how I grew up was similar maybe and different from how you were sharing Danielle, where it was like always vote Republican because they're going to be against abortion and they're going to be against gay marriage. And those were the two in my world that were the things that I was supposed to vote for no matter what. And now just seeing how far that no matter what is willing to go is really terrifying.Danielle (36:25):Yeah, I agree. Jenny. I mean, again, I keep talking about him, but he's so important to me. The idea that my great grandfather to escape religious oppression would literally walk 1,950 miles and would leave an oppressive system just in an attempt to get away. That walk has to mean something to me today. You can't forget. All of my family has to remember that he did a walk like that. How many of us have walked that far? I mean, I haven't ever walked that far in just one instance to escape something. And he was poor because he couldn't even pay for his mom's burial at the Catholic church. So he said, let me get out of this. And then of course he landed with the Methodist and he was back in the fire again. But I come back to him, and that's what people will do to get out of religious oppression. They will give it an effort and when they can. And so I think it's important to remember those stories. I'm off on my tangent again now because it feels so important. It's a good one.Starlette (37:42):I think it's important to highlight the walking away from, to putting one foot in front of the other, praying with your feet(37:51):That it's its own. You answer your own prayer by getting away from it. It is to say that he was done with it, and if no one else was going to move, he was going to move himself that he didn't wait for the change in the institution. Let's just change directions and get away from it. And I hate to even imagine what he was faced with and that he had to make that decision. And what propelled him to walk that long with that kind of energy to keep momentum and to create that amount of distance. So for me, it's very telling. I ran away at 12. I had had it, so I get it. This is the last time you're going to hit me.Not going to beat me out of my sleep. I knew that at 12. This is no place for me. So I admire people who get up in the dead of night, get up without a warning, make it up in their mind and said, that's the last time, or This is not what I'm going to do. This is not the way that I want to be, and I'm leaving. I admire him. Sounds like a hero. I think we should have a holiday.Danielle (38:44):And then imagine telling that. Then you're going to tell me that people like my grandfather are just in it. This is where it leaves reality for me and leaves Christianity that he's just in it to steal someone's job. This man worked the lemon fields and then as a side job in his retired years, moved up to Sacramento, took in people off death row at Folsom Prison, took 'em to his home and nursed them until they passed. So this is the kind a person that will walk 1,950 miles. They'll do a lot of good in the world, and we're telling people that they can't come here. That's the kind of people that are walking here. That's the kind of people that are coming here. They're coming here to do whatever they can. And then they're nurturing families. They're actually living out in their families what supposed Christians are saying they want to be. Because people in these two parent households and these white families, they're actually raising the kind of people that will shoot Charlie Kirk. It's not people like my grandfather that walked almost 2000 miles to form a better life and take care of people out of prisons. Those aren't the people forming children that are, you'reStarlette (40:02):Going to email for that. The deacons will you in the parking lot for that one. You you're going to get a nasty tweet for that one. Somebody's going to jump off in the comments and straighten you out at,Danielle (40:17):I can't help it. It's true. That's the reality. Someone that will put their feet and their faith to that kind of practice is not traveling just so they can assault someone or rob someone. I mean, yes, there are people that have done that, but there's so much intentionality about moving so far. It does not carry the weight of, can you imagine? Let me walk 2000 miles to Rob my neighbor. That doesn't make any sense.Starlette (40:46):Sounds like it's own kind of pilgrimage.Jenny (40:59):I have so many thoughts, but I think whiteness has just done such a number on people. And I'm hearing each of you and I'm thinking, I don't know that I could tell one story from any of my grandparents. I think that that is part of whiteness. And it's not that I didn't know them, but it's that the ways in which Transgenerational family lines are passed down are executed for people in considered white bodies where it's like my grandmother, I guess I can't tell some stories, but she went to Polish school and in the States and was part of a Polish community. And then very quickly on polls were grafted into whiteness so that they could partake in the GI Bill. And so that Polish heritage was then lost. And that was not that long ago, but it was a severing that happened. And some of my ancestors from England, that severing happened a long time ago where it's like, we are not going to tell the stories of our ancestors because that would actually reveal that this whole white thing is made up. And we actually have so much more to us than that. And so I feel like the social privilege that has come from that, but also the visceral grief of how I would want to know those stories of my ancestors that aren't there. Because in part of the way that whiteness operates,Starlette (42:59):I'm glad you told that story. Diane de Prima, she tells about that, about her parents giving up their Italian ness, giving up their heritage and being Italian at home and being white in public. So not changing their name, shortening their name, losing their accent, or dropping the accent. I'm glad that you said that. I think that's important. But like you said though, if you tell those stories and it shakes up the power dynamic for whiteness, it's like, oh, but there are books how the Irish became White, the Making of Whiteness working for Whiteness, read all the books by David Broer on Whiteness Studies. But I'm glad that you told us. I think it's important, and I love that you named it as a severing. Why did you choose that word in particular?Jenny (43:55):I had the privilege a few years ago of going to Poland and doing an ancestry trip. And weeks before I went, an extended cousin in the States had gotten connected with our fifth cousin in Poland. We share the fifth grandparents. And this cousin of mine took us around to the church where my fifth great grandparents got married and these just very visceral places. And I had never felt the land that my ancestors know in my body. And there was something really, really powerful of that. And so I think of severing as I have been cut off from that lineage and that heritage because of whiteness. And I feel very, very grateful for the ways in which that is beginning to heal and beginning to mend. And we can tell truer stories of our ancestry and where we come from and the practices of our people. And I think it is important to acknowledge the cost and the privilege that has come from that severing in order to get a job that was not reserved for people that weren't white. My family decided, okay, well we'll just play the part. We will take on that role of whiteness because that will then give us that class privilege and that socioeconomic privilege that reveals how much of a construct whitenessStarlette (45:50):A racial contract is what Charles W. Mills calls it, that there's a deal made in a back room somewhere that you'll trade your sense of self for another. And so that it doesn't, it just unravels all the ways in which white supremacy, white body supremacy, pos itself, oh, that we're better. I think people don't say anything because it unravels those lies, those tongue twisters that persons have spun over the centuries, that it's really just an agreement that we've decided that we'll make ourselves the majority so that we can bully everybody else. And nobody wants to be called that. Nobody wants to be labeled greedy. I'm just trying to provide for my family, but at what expense? At who else's expense. But I like to live in this neighborhood and I don't want to be stopped by police. But you're willing to sacrifice other people. And I think that's why it becomes problematic and troublesome because persons have to look at themselves.(46:41):White body supremacy doesn't offer that reflection. If it did, persons would see how monstrous it is that under the belly of the beast, seeing the underside of that would be my community. We know what it costs for other people to feel really, really important because that's what whiteness demands. In order to look down your nose on somebody, you got to stand on somebody's back. Meanwhile, our communities are teaching each other to stand. We stand on the shoulders of giants. It's very communal. It's a shared identity and way of being. Whereas whiteness demands allegiance by way of violence, violent taking and grabbing it is quite the undoing. We have a lot of work to do. But I am proud of you for telling that story.Danielle (47:30):I wanted to read this quote by Gloria, I don't know if you know her. Do you know her? She writes, the struggle is inner Chicano, Indio, American Indian, Molo, Mexicano, immigrant, Latino, Anglo and power working class Anglo black, Asian. Our psyches resemble the border towns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner and has played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before interchanges and which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the real world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.(48:16):So Jenny, when you're talking, you had some image in your head before you went to Poland, before it became reality. You had some, it didn't start with just knowing your cousin or whatever it happened before that. Or for me being confronted and having to confront things with my husband about ways we've been complicit or engaged in almost like the word comes gerrymandering our own future. That's kind of how it felt sometimes Luis and I and how to become aware of that and take away those scales off our own eyes and then just sit in the reality, oh no, we're really here and this is where we're really at. And so where are we going to go from here? And starlet, you've talked from your own position. That's just what comes to mind. It's something that happens inside. I mean, she talks about head, I think more in feelings in my chest. That's where it happens for me. But yeah, that's what comes to mind.Starlette (49:48):With. I feel like crying because of what we've done to our bodies and the bodies of other people. And we still can't see ourselves not as fully belonging to each other, not as beloved, not as holy.It's deeply saddening that for all the time that we have here together for all the time that we'll share with each other, we'll spend much of it not seeing each other at all.Danielle (50:57):My mind's going back to, I think I might've shared this right before you joined Starla, where it was like, I really believe the words of Jesus that says, what good is it for someone to gain the world and lose their soul? And that's what I hear. And what I feel is this soul loss. And I don't know how to convince other people. And I don't know if that's the point that their soul is worth it, but I think I've, not that I do it perfectly, but I think I've gotten to the place where I'm like, I believe my interiority is worth more than what it would be traded in for.(51:45):And I think that will be a lifelong journey of trying to figure out how to wrestle with a system. I will always be implicated in because I am talking to you on a device that was made from cobalt, from Congo and wearing clothes that were made in other countries. And there's no way I can make any decision other than to just off myself immediately. And I'm not saying I'm doing that, but I'm saying the part of the wrestle is that this is, everything is unresolved. And how do I, like what you said, Danielle, what did you say? Can you tune into this conversation?Jenny (52:45):Yeah. And how do I keep tapping in even when it means engaging my own implication in this violence? It's easier to be like, oh, those people over there that are doing those things. And it's like, wait, now how do I stay situated and how I'm continually perpetuating it as well, and how do I try to figure out how to untangle myself in that? And I think that will be always I,Danielle (53:29):He says, the US Mexican border as like an open wound where the third world grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds. Two worlds merging to form a third country, a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary is it is in a constant state of transition. They're prohibited and forbidden arts inhabitants. And I think that as a Latina that really describes and mixed with who my father is and that side that I feel like I live like the border in me, it feels like it grates against me. So I hear you, Jenny, and I feel very like all the resonance, and I hear you star led, and I feel a lot of resonance there too. But to deny either thing would make me less human because I am human with both of those parts of me.(54:45):But also to engage them brings a lot of grief for both parts of me. And how does that mix together? It does feel like it's in a constant state of transition. And that's partly why Latinos, I think particularly Latino men bought into this lie of power and played along. And now they're getting shown that no, that part of you that's European, that part never counted at all. And so there is no way to buy into that racialized system. There's no way to put a down payment in and come out on the other side as human. As soon as we buy into it, we're less human. Yeah. Oh, Jenny has to go in a minute. Me too. But starlet, you're welcome to join us any Thursday. Okay.Speaker 1 (55:51):Afternoon. Bye. Thank you. Bye bye.Kitsap County & Washington State Crisis and Mental Health ResourcesIf you or someone else is in immediate danger, please call 911.This resource list provides crisis and mental health contacts for Kitsap County and across Washington State.Kitsap County / Local ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They OfferSalish Regional Crisis Line / Kitsap Mental Health 24/7 Crisis Call LinePhone: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/24/7 emotional support for suicide or mental health crises; mobile crisis outreach; connection to services.KMHS Youth Mobile Crisis Outreach TeamEmergencies via Salish Crisis Line: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://sync.salishbehavioralhealth.org/youth-mobile-crisis-outreach-team/Crisis outreach for minors and youth experiencing behavioral health emergencies.Kitsap Mental Health Services (KMHS)Main: 360‑373‑5031; Toll‑free: 888‑816‑0488; TDD: 360‑478‑2715Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/Outpatient, inpatient, crisis triage, substance use treatment, stabilization, behavioral health services.Kitsap County Suicide Prevention / “Need Help Now”Call the Salish Regional Crisis Line at 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/Suicide-Prevention-Website.aspx24/7/365 emotional support; connects people to resources; suicide prevention assistance.Crisis Clinic of the PeninsulasPhone: 360‑479‑3033 or 1‑800‑843‑4793Website: https://www.bainbridgewa.gov/607/Mental-Health-ResourcesLocal crisis intervention services, referrals, and emotional support.NAMI Kitsap CountyWebsite: https://namikitsap.org/Peer support groups, education, and resources for individuals and families affected by mental illness.Statewide & National Crisis ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They Offer988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (WA‑988)Call or text 988; Website: https://wa988.org/Free, 24/7 support for suicidal thoughts, emotional distress, relationship problems, and substance concerns.Washington Recovery Help Line1‑866‑789‑1511Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesHelp for mental health, substance use, and problem gambling; 24/7 statewide support.WA Warm Line877‑500‑9276Website: https://www.crisisconnections.org/wa-warm-line/Peer-support line for emotional or mental health distress; support outside of crisis moments.Native & Strong Crisis LifelineDial 988 then press 4Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesCulturally relevant crisis counseling by Indigenous counselors.Additional Helpful Tools & Tips• Behavioral Health Services Access: Request assessments and access to outpatient, residential, or inpatient care through the Salish Behavioral Health Organization. Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/SBHO-Get-Behaviroal-Health-Services.aspx• Deaf / Hard of Hearing: Use your preferred relay service (for example dial 711 then the appropriate number) to access crisis services.• Warning Signs & Risk Factors: If someone is talking about harming themselves, giving away possessions, expressing hopelessness, or showing extreme behavior changes, contact crisis resources immediately.Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that. Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Bio: Jenny - Co-Host Podcast (er):I am Jenny! (She/Her) MACP, LMHCI am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, Certified Yoga Teacher, and an Approved Supervisor in the state of Washington.I have spent over a decade researching the ways in which the body can heal from trauma through movement and connection. I have come to see that our bodies know what they need. By approaching our body with curiosity we can begin to listen to the innate wisdom our body has to teach us. And that is where the magic happens!I was raised within fundamentalist Christianity. I have been, and am still on my own journey of healing from religious trauma and religious sexual shame (as well as consistently engaging my entanglement with white saviorism). I am a white, straight, able-bodied, cis woman. I recognize the power and privilege this affords me socially, and I am committed to understanding my bias' and privilege in the work that I do. I am LGBTQIA+ affirming and actively engage critical race theory and consultation to see a better way forward that honors all bodies of various sizes, races, ability, religion, gender, and sexuality.I am immensely grateful for the teachers, healers, therapists, and friends (and of course my husband and dog!) for the healing I have been offered. I strive to pay it forward with my clients and students. Few things make me happier than seeing people live freely in their bodies from the inside out!Rebecca A. Wheeler Walston, J.D., Master of Arts in CounselingEmail: asolidfoundationcoaching@gmail.comPhone:  +1.5104686137Website: Rebuildingmyfoundation.comI have been doing story work for nearly a decade. I earned a Master of Arts in Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary and trained in story work at The Allender Center at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. I have served as a story facilitator and trainer at both The Allender Center and the Art of Living Counseling Center. I currently see clients for one-on-one story coaching and work as a speaker and facilitator with Hope & Anchor, an initiative of The Impact Movement, Inc., bringing the power of story work to college students.By all accounts, I should not be the person that I am today. I should not have survived the difficulties and the struggles that I have faced. At best, I should be beaten down by life‘s struggles, perhaps bitter. I should have given in and given up long ago. But I was invited to do the good work of (re)building a solid foundation. More than once in my life, I have witnessed God send someone my way at just the right moment to help me understand my own story, and to find the strength to step away from the seemingly inevitable ending of living life in defeat. More than once I have been invited and challenged to find the resilience that lies within me to overcome the difficult moment. To trust in the goodness and the power of a kind gesture. What follows is a snapshot of a pivotal invitation to trust the kindness of another in my own story. May it invite you to receive to the pivotal invitation of kindness in your own story. Listen with me…     Danielle (00:17):Welcome to the Arise podcast, and as you know, we're continuing on the intersection of where our reality meets and today it's where our reality meets our resilience. And how do we define that? A lovely conversation. It's actually just part one. I'm thinking it's going to be multiple conversations. Jenny McGrath, LMHC, and Rebecca Wheeler, Walston. Join me again, look for their bios in the notes and tag along with us. I thought we could start by talking about what do we see as resilience in this moment and what do we see, maybe like I'm saying a lot now, what do we see as the ideal of that resilience and what is actually accessible to us? Because I think there's these great quotes from philosophers and our ancestors, but we don't know all their day-to-day life. What did it look like day to day? So I'm wondering, just kind of posing that for you all, what do you think about resilience? How does it intersect with this moment and how do we kind of ground ourselves in reality?Rebecca (01:33):Rebecca? Coffee helps. Coffee definitely helps. It does. I have coffee here.(01:42):Me too. I would probably try to start with something of a working definition of the word. One of the things that I think makes this moment difficult in terms of a sense of what's real and what's not is the way that our vocabulary is being co-opted or redefined without our permission. And things are being defined in ways that are not accurate or not grounded in reality. And I think that that's part of what feels disorienting in this moment. So I would love for us to just start with a definition of the word, and I'm guessing the three of us will have different versions of that.(02:25):So if I had to start, I would say that I used to think about resilience as sort of springing back to a starting point. You started in this place and then something knocked you off of where you started. And resilience is about making it back to the place that you were before you got knocked off of your path. And my definition of that word has shifted in recent years to a sense of resilience that is more about having come through some difficulty. I don't actually bounce back to where I started. I actually adopt a new normal new starting place that has integrated the lessons learned or the strengths or the skills developed for having gone through the process of facing something difficult.Jenny, I love that. I feel like it reminds me of a conversation you and I had many moons ago, Rebecca, around what is flourishing and kind of these maybe idealistic ideas around something that isn't actually rooted in reality. And I love that that definition of resistance feels so committed to being in reality. And I am not going to erase everything I went through to try to get back to something, but I'm actually going to, my word is compost or use what I've gone through to bring me to where I am. Now, this will not surprise either of you. I think when I think of resilience, I think somatically and how we talk about a nervous system or a body and what allows resilience. And so one of the ways that that is talked about is through heart rate variability and our ability for our heart to speed up and slow down is one of the defining factors of our body's ability to stay resilient.(04:42):Can I come to a state of rest and I think about how rest is a privilege that not all bodies have. And so when I think about resilience in that way, it makes me think about how do I actually zoom out of resilience being about an individual body and how do we form kind of more of a collective sense of resilience where we are coworking to create a world where all bodies get to return to that level of safety and rest and comfort and aren't having to stay in a mode of vigilance. And so I see resilience almost as one of the directions that I'm wanting to move and not a place that we're at yet collectively. Collectively meaning whoJenny (05:41):I say collectively, I'm hoping for a world that does not exist yet where it gets to be all bodies, human and non-human, and the ways in which we allow ecosystems to rest, we allow a night sky to rest. We allow ourselves to become more in rhythm with the activation and deactivation that I think nature teaches us of more summer and winter and day and night and these rhythms that I think we're meant to flow in. But in a productive capitalistic society where lights are never turned off and energy is only ever thought about and how do we produce more or different energy, I'm like, how do we just stop producing energy and just take a nap? I'm really inspired by the nat ministry of just like rest actually is a really important part of resistance. And so I have these lofty ideals of what collective means while being aware that we are coming to that collective from very different places in our unresolved historical relational field that we're in.I would say there's a lot I'd love about that, all of that. And I, dear use of the word lofty, I feel that word in this moment that causes me to consider the things that feel like they're out of reach. I think the one thing that I would probably add to what you said is I think you used the phrase like returning to a state of rest when you were talking about heart rate and body. And if we're talking about an individual ability to catch my breath and slow it down, I can track with you through the returning to something. But when we go from that individual to this collective space where I live in the hyphenated existence of the African American story, I don't have the sense of returning to something because African hyphen American people were born as a people group out of this horrific traumatic space called the transatlantic slave trade.(08:15):And so I don't know that our bodies have ever known a sense of rest on us soil. And I don't know that I would feel that that sense of rest on the continent either having been there several times, that sense of something happened in the transition from Africa to America, that I lost my africanness in such a way that doesn't feel like a place of rest. And sometimes we talk about it in terms of for certain people groups, land is connected to that sense of rest for Native Americans, for indigenous people, for certain Latin cultures. But for the African American person, there's not a connection to land. There's only maybe a connection to the water of the transatlantic slave trade. And then water is never at rest. It's always moving, right? So I stay with you and then I lose you and then I come back to you.Danielle (09:25):That feels like a normal part of healing. I stay with you, I lose you and then I come back to you. I think resilience for me has meant living in this family with my partner who's a first generation immigrant and then having kids and having to remind myself that my kids were raised by both of us with two wildly different perspectives even though we share culture. And so there's things that are taught, there's things that are learned that are very different lessons that I cannot be surprised about what might be a form of resilience for my child and what might be a struggle where there isn't groundwork there.(10:22):I remember when Luis came to the United States, his parents said to him, we'll see you in a couple weeks. And I used to think my young self, I was like, what does that mean? They don't think we're going to stay married or whatever. But his dad also told him, be careful up there, be careful. And if Luis were here to tell this story, he said it many times. He's like, I didn't come to the United States because I thought it was the best thing that could happen to me. I came to marry you, I came to be with you, but I didn't come here because it was the best thing to happen to me. When his family came up for the wedding, they were very explicit. We didn't come here, we're not in awe. They wanted to make sure people knew we're okay. And I know there's wildly different experiences on the spectrum of this, but I think about that a lot. And so resilience has looked really different for us.(11:23):I think it is forming that bond with people that came here because they needed work or a different kind of setting or change to people that are already here. And I think as you witness our culture now, handle what's happening with kidnappings, what's happening with moms, what's happening with people on the street, snatching people off the street. You see that in the last election there was a wide range of voters on our side on the Latinx Latina side, and there was a spectrum of thoughts on what would actually help our community. But now you're seeing that quickly contract and basically like, oh shit, that wasn't helpful. So I think my challenge to myself has been how do I stay? Part of resilience for me is how do I stay in contact with people that I love that don't share in the same view as humanity as me? And I think that's an exercise that our people have done for a long time.Rebecca (12:38):Say that last sentence one more time, Danielle.Danielle (12:42):Just like, how do I stay in contact with people that I love that don't share my view of humanity, that don't share the valuation of humanity? How do I stay in contact with them because I actually see them as human too. And I think that's been a part of our resiliency over many years in Latin America just due to constant interference from European governmental powers.Rebecca (13:16):That partly why I think I asked you to repeat that last sentence is because I think I disconnected for a minute and I want to be mindful of disconnecting over a sentence that is about staying connected to people who don't value the same things that I value or don't value or see humanity in the way that I see in humanity. And I'm super aware, part of the conversation that's happening in the black community in this moment, particularly with black women, is the idea that we're not going to step to the forefront in this one. We are culturally, collectively, consciously making a decision to check out. And so if you see any of this on social media, there's a sense of like we're standing around learning line dances from Beyonce about boots on the ground instead of actively engaging in this moment. And so I have some ambivalence about whether or not does that count as resilience, right?(14:28):And is it resilient in a way that's actually kind to us as a people? And I'm not sure if I have an answer to that yet. In my mind the jury is still out, right? There are things about black women stepping to the side that make me really nervous because that's not who we are. It's not historically who we have been. And I am concerned that what we're doing is cutting off parts of ourself. And at the same time, I can tell you that I have not watched a news program. I have not watched a single news recording of anything since November 2nd, 2024.Danielle (15:13):I can just feel the tension of all of our different viewpoints, not that we're in conflict with one another, but we're not exactly on the same page either. And not that we're not on the same team, but I can feel that pull. Anybody else feel that?Rebecca (15:35):Does it feel like, I would agree we're not on the same page and in some ways I don't expect that we would be because we're so different. But does that pull feel like an invitation to clash or does it feel like it is actually okay to not necessarily be on the same page?Danielle (16:06):Well, I think it feels both things. I think I feel okay with it because I know you all and I'm trying to practice that. And I also think I feel annoyed that we can't all be on the same page some sense of annoyance. But I don't know if that annoyance is from you all. I feel the annoyance. It feels like noise from the outside to me a bit. It is not you or Jenny, it's just a general annoyance with how hard this shit is.Rebecca (16:45):And I definitely feel like one of the things I think that happens around supremacy and whiteness on us soil is the larger narrative that we have to be at odds with one another that there isn't a capacity or a way that would allow us to differentiate and not villainize or demonize the person that you are or the community that you are differentiated from. And I think we haven't always had the space collectively to think about what does it mean to walk alongside, what does it mean to lock arms? What does it mean to pull resources even with someone that we're on the same team, but maybe not at the same vantage point.Jenny (17:47):I have two thoughts. Three, I guess I'm aware even my continual work around internalized white saviorism, that part of my ambivalence is like where do you each need me? Are we aligning with people or are we saying f you to people? And I can feel that within me and it takes so much work to come back to, I might actually have a third way that's different than both of you, and that gets to be okay too. But I'm aware that there is that tendency to step into over alignment out of this savior movement and mentality. So just wanted to name that that is there.(18:41):And as you were sharing Rebecca, the word that came to mind for me was orthodoxy. And I don't often think of white supremacy without thinking of Christian supremacy because they've been so interlocked for so long. And the idea that there are many faith traditions including the Jewish tradition that has a mid rash. And it's like we actually come to scripture and we argue about it because we have different viewpoints and that's beautiful and lovely because the word of God is living in all of us. And when orthodoxy came around, it's like, no, we have to be in 100% agreement of these theologies or these doctrines and that's what it means to be Christian. And then eventually I think that's what it means to be a white Christian. So yeah, I think for folks like myself who were immersed in that world growing up, it feels existentially terrifying because it's like if I don't align with the orthodoxy of whiteness or Christianity or capitalism, it viscerally feels like I am risking eternity in hell. And so I better just play it safe and agree with whatever my pastor tells me or whatever the next white Republican male tells me. And so I feel that the weight of what this mindset of orthodoxy has done,Rebecca (20:21):I'm like, I got to take a breath on that one because I got a lot of stuff going on internally. And I think, so my faith tradition has these sort of two parallels. There's this space that I grew up in was rooted in the black church experience and then also in college that introduction into that white evangelical parachurch space where all of that orthodoxy was very, very loud and a version of Christianity that was there is but one way to do all of these things and that one way looks like this. And if you're doing anything other than that, there's something wrong with what you're doing. And so for me, there are parts of me that can walk with you right through that orthodoxy door. And there's also this part of me where the black church experience was actually birthed in opposition to that orthodoxy, that same orthodoxy that said I was three fifths of a person, that same orthodoxy that said that my conversion to Christianity on earth did not change my status as an enslaved person.(21:39):And so I have this other faith tradition that is built around the notion that that orthodoxy is actually a perversion of authentic Christian expression. And so I have both of those things in my body right now going, and so that's just my reaction I think to what you said. I feel both of those things and there are times when I will say to my husband, Ooh, my evangelical illness is showing because I can feel it, like want to push back on this flexibility and this oxygen that is in the room through the black church experience that says I get to come as I am with no apology and no explanation, and Jesus will meet me wherever that is end of conversation, end debate.Danielle (22:46):I don't know. I had a lot of thoughts. They're all kind of mumbled together. I think we have a lot of privilege to have a conversation like this because when you leave a space like this that's curated with people, you've had relationships over a long time maybe had disagreements with or rubbed scratchy edges with. When you get out into the world, you encounter a lot of big feelings that are unprocessed and they don't have words and they have a lot of room for interpretation. So you're just getting hit, hit, hit, hit and the choices to engage, how do you honor that person and engage? You don't want to name their feelings, you don't want to take over interpreting them, but it feels in this moment that we're being invited to interpret one another's feelings a lot. But here we're putting language to that. I mean Jenny and I talked about it recently, but it turns into a lot of relational cutoffs.(23:55):I can't talk to you because X, I can't talk to you because X, I don't want to read your news article. And a lot of times they're like, Danielle, why did you read Charlie Kirk? And I was like, because I have family that was interested in it. I've been watching his videos for years because I wanted to understand what are they hearing, what's going on. Yeah, did it make me mad sometimes? Absolutely. Did I turn it off? Yeah, I still engage and then I swing and listen to the Midas touch or whatever just like these opposite ends and it gives me great joy to listen to something like that. But when we're out and about, if we're saying resiliency comes through connection to our culture and to one another, but then with all the big feelings you can feel just the formidable splits anywhere you go, the danger of speaking of what's unspeakable and you get in a room with people you agree with and then suddenly you can talk. And I don't know how many of us are in rooms where resilience is actually even required in a conversation.Rebecca (25:15):It makes me think about the idea that we don't have good sort of rules of engagement around how to engage someone that thinks differently than we do and we have to kind of create them on the fly. When you were talking Danielle about the things you choosing to read Charlie Kirk, or not choosing to listen to something that reflects your values or not, and the invitation in this moment or the demand that if someone thinks differently than me, it is just a straight cutoff. I'm not even willing to consider that there's any kind of veracity in your viewpoint whatsoever. And I think we don't have good theology, we don't have good vocabulary, we don't have good rules of engagement about when is it okay to say, actually, I'm going to choose not to engage you. And what are the reasons why we would do that that are good reasons, that are wise reasons that are kind reasons? And I think the country is in a debate about that and we don't always get the answer to those questions and because we don't get it right then there's just relational debris all over the floor.Jenny (26:47):I'm just thinking about, I am far from skilled or perfect at this by any means, but I feel like these last couple years I live in a van and one of the reasons that we decided to do that was that we would say, I think I know two things about every state, and they're probably both wrong. And I think for our own reasons, my husband and I don't like other people telling us what is true. We like to learn and discover and feel it in our own bodies. And so it's been really important for us to literally physically go to places and talk to people. And I think it has been a giant lesson for me on nuance and that nobody is all one thing. And often there's people that are on the completely opposite side of the aisle, but we actually look at the same issues and we have a problem with the issues. We just have heard very, very different ways of fixing or tending to those issues. And so I think often if we can come down to what are we fearing, what is happening, what is going on, we can kind of wrestle there a little bit more than jumping to, so what's the solution? And staying more in that dirt level.(28:22):And not always perfectly of course, but I think that's been one of the things in an age of the algorithm and social media, it is easy for me to have very broad views of what certain states or certain people groups or certain voting demographics are like. And then when you are face to face, you have to wrestle. And I love that when you said, Daniel, I see them as human. And it's like, oh yeah, it's so much easier to see someone as not human when I'm learning about them from a TikTok reel or from a news segment than when I'm sharing a meal with them and hearing about their story and how they've come to believe the things they've believed or wrestle with the things they're wrestling with.Rebecca (29:14):Two things. One, I think what you're talking about Jenny, is the value of proximity. The idea that I've stepped close to someone into their space, into their world with a posture of I'm going to just listen. I'm going to learn, I'm going to be curious. And in that curiosity, open handed and open-minded about all kinds of assumptions and presuppositions. And you're right, we don't do that a lot. The second thing that I was thinking when you mentioned getting into the dirt, I think you used the phrase like staying in the darker sort of edges of some of those hard conversations. That feels like a choice towards resiliency. To me, the idea that I will choose of my will to stay in the room, in the relationship, in the conversation long enough to wrestle long enough to learn something long enough to have my perspective challenged in a real way that makes me rethink the way I see something or the lens that I have on that particular subject.(30:33):And I don't think we could use more of that in this moment. I think probably our friendship, what started as a professional connection that has over the years developed into this friendship is about the choice to stay connected and the choice to stay in the conversation. I know when I first met you, we were going to do a seminar together and someone said, oh yeah, Jenny's getting ready to talk on something about white people. And I had 8,000 assumptions about what you were going to say and all kinds of opinions about my assumptions about what you're going to say. And I was like, well, I want to talk to her. I want to know what is she going to say? And really it was because if she says anything crazy, we right, we all have problems, me and you, right? And the graciousness with which you actually entered that conversation to go like, okay, I'm listening. What is it that you want to ask me? I think as part of why we're still friends, why we're still colleagues, why we still work together, is that invitation from you, that acceptance of that invitation from me. Can we wrestle? Can we box over this and come out the other side having learned something about ourselves and each other?Jenny (32:10):And I think part of that for me, what I have to do is reach for my lineage pre whiteness. And I have this podcast series that I love called Search for the Slavic Soul that has made me make more sense to myself. And there's this entire episode on why do Slavic people love to argue? And I'm like, oh, yes. And I think part of that has been me working out that place of white woman fragility that says, if someone questions my ideas or my values or my views, I need to disintegrate and I need to crumple. And so I'm actually so grateful for that time and for how we've continued to be able to say, I don't agree with that, and we can still be okay and we can still kind of navigate because of course we're probably going to see things differently based on our experiences.Danielle (33:16):That is exactly the problem though is because there's a lot of, not everybody, but there's a lot of folks that don't really have a sense of self or have a sense of their own body. So there's so much enmeshment with whoever they're with. So when then confronted and mesh, I mean merging, we're the same self. It adds protection. Think about it. We all do it. Sometimes I need to be people just like me. It's not bad. But if that sense of merging will cost you the ability to connect to someone different than you or that sees very different than you, and when they confront that, if they're quote alone physically or alone emotionally in that moment, they'll disappear or they'll cut you off or they'll go away or it comes out as violence. I believe it comes out as shootings as we could go on with the list of violent outcomes that kind of cut, that kind of separation happens. So I mean, I'm not like Jenny, that's awesome. And it doesn't feel that typical to me.Rebecca (34:36):What you just described to me, Daniel, I have been going like, isn't that whiteness though, the whole point, and I'm talking about whiteness, not the people who believe themselves to be white, to quote taishi quotes. The whole point of whiteness is this enmeshment of all these individual European countries and cultures and people into this one big blob that has no real face on it. And maybe that's where the fragility comes from. So I love when Jenny said, it makes me reach back into my ancestry pre whiteness, and I'm going, that needs to be on a t-shirt. Please put it on a t-shirt, a coffee mug, a hat, something. And so that's sort of Taishi Coates concept of the people who believe themselves to be white is a way to put into words this idea that that's not actually your story. It's not actually your ancestry.(35:43):It's not actually your lineage. It's the disruption and the eraser and the stealing of your lineage in exchange for access to power and privilege. And I do think it is this enmeshment, this collective enmeshment of an entire European continent. And perhaps you're right that that's where the fragility comes from. So when you try to extract a person or a people group out of that, I don't know who I am, if absent this label of whiteness, I don't know what that means by who I am now I'm talking like I know what I'm talking about. I'm not white, so let me shut up. Maybe that means Jenny, you could say if I misunderstood you misquoted, you misrepresented allJenny (36:31):The No, no, I think yeah, I'm like, yes, yes, yes. And it also makes me go back to what you said about proximity. And I think that that is part of the design of whiteness, and even what you were saying about faith, and you can correct me, but my understanding is that those who could vote and those who could own property were Christian. And then when enslaved black people started converting to Christianity and saying, I can actually take pieces of this and I can own this and I can have this white enslavers had a conundrum because then they couldn't use the word Christian in the way that they used to justify chattel slavery and wealth disparity. So they created the word white, and so then it was then white people that could own property and could vote. And so what that did was also disable a class solidarity between lower socioeconomic white bodies and newly emancipated black bodies to say, no, we're not in this together struggling against those that own the highest wealth. I have this pseudo connection with bodies that hold wealth because of the color of my skin. And so then it removes both my proximity to my own body and my proximity to bodies that are probably in a similar struggle, very disproportionate and different than my own because I have white privilege. But it also then makes white bodies align with the system instead of co-conspirator with bodies working towards liberation.Rebecca (38:32):I do think that that's true. I think there's a lot of data historically about the intentional division that was driven between poor people in the colonies and wealthy people in the colonies. And I say people because I think the class stratification included enslaved Africans, free Africans, poor whites, native American people that were there as well. And so I think that there was a kind of diversity there in terms of race and ethnicity and nationality that was intentionally split and then reorganize along racial lines. The only thing that I would add on the Christian or the faith spectrum is that there's a book by Jamar TBE called The Color of Compromise. And one of the things that he talks about in that book is the religious debate that was happening when the colonies were being organized around if you proselytize your slave and they convert, then do you have to emancipate them?(39:43):Because in England, the religious law was that you could not enslave or in put a believer into servitude in any form, whether that's indentured servitude or slavery. Well, I got a problem with the premise, the idea that if you were not a Christian in medieval England, I could do whatever I wanted to. The premise is wrong in the first place. The thought that you could own or indenture a human to another human is problematic on its face. So I just want to name that the theological frame that they brought from England was already jacked, and then they superimposed it in the colonies and made a conscious decision at the House of Burgess, which is about a mile from where I'm sitting, made a conscious decision to decide that your conversion to Christianity does not impact any part of your life on earth. It only impacts your eternity. So all you did was by fire insurance, meaning that your eternity is now in heaven and not in hell, but on earth I can do whatever I want. And that split that perversion of the gospel at that moment to decide that the kingdom of God has nothing to do with what is happening on earth is something we're still living with today. Right? It's the reason why you have 90 some odd percent of evangelicals voting for all kinds of policies that absolutely violate every tenant of scripture in the Bible and probably every other holy book on the planet, and then still standing in their pulpit on Sunday morning and preaching that they represent God. It's ridiculous. It's offensive.Danielle (41:38):I just feel like this is proving my point. So I feel like other people may have said this, but who's kept talking about this exchange for whiteness? Bro, we're in the timeline where Jesus, their Jesus said yes to the devil. He's like, give me the power, give me the money, give me the bread. And if you want to come into their religion, you have to trade in how God actually made you for to say yes to that same temptation for power and money and whatever, and erase your face's. One comment. Second comment is this whole thing about not giving healthcare to poor families.(42:20):I hesitate to say this word, but I'm reminded of the story of the people that first came here from England, and I'm aware that they were starving at one point, and I'm aware that they actually ate off their own people, and that's partly how they survived. And it feels the same way to me, here, give us the power, give us the control, give us the money. And we're like, the fact is, is that cutting off healthcare for millions of Americans doesn't affect immigrants at all. They're not on those plans. It affects most poor whites and they have no problem doing it and then saying, come, give me your bread. Come give me your cheese. Come give me your vote. It's like a self flesh eating virus, and(43:20):I am almost speechless from it. There's this rumor that migrants have all the health insurance, and I know that's not true because Luis legally came here. He had paperwork, he was documented, got his green card, then got his citizenship, and even after citizenship to prove we could get health insurance, when he got off his job, we had to not only submit his passport, but his certificate that was proof of citizenship through the state of Washington, a very liberal state to get him on health insurance. So I know there's not 25 million immigrants in the country falsifying those records. That's just not happening. So I know that that's a lie from personal experience, but I also know that the point is, the point is the lie. The point is to tell you the lie and actually stab the person in the back that you're lying to. That just feels dark to me. I went off, sorry, that's kind of off the subject of resilience.Rebecca (44:36):No, I have two reactions to that. The first one is when we were talking just a few minutes ago about the exchange for power and privilege, it's actually a false invitation to a table that doesn't actually exist. That's what, to me is darkest about it. It's the promise of this carrot that you have no intention of ever delivering. And people have so bought into the lie so completely that it's like you didn't even stop to consider that, let alone the ability to actually see this is not actually an invitation to anything. So that is partly what I think about. And if you read the book, the Sum of Us, it actually talks about Sum, SUM, the sum of us. It actually talks about the cost, the economic cost of racism, and each chapter is about a different industry and how there were racist policies set up in that industry.(45:49):And basically the point the author makes is that at every turn, in order to subjugate and oppress a community of color, white people had to sacrifice something for themselves and oppress themselves and disenfranchise themselves in order to pull it off. And they did it anyway because essentially it is wealthy white, it's affluent white male that ends up with the power and the privilege, and everybody else is subjugated and oppressed. And that's a conversation. I don't understand it. The gaslighting is got to be astronomical and brilliant to convince an entire community of people to vote against themselves. So I'm over there with you on the limb, Danielle,Jenny (47:16):Yeah, I am thinking about Fox News and how most impoverished white communities, that is the only source of information that they have because there isn't proximity and there isn't a lot of other conversations. It is exactly what Tucker Carlson or all of these people are spewing. And I think fear is such a powerful tool, and honestly, I don't see it as that different than early indoctrination around hell and using that to capitulate people into the roles that the church wanted them. And so it's like things might be bad now, but there are going to be so much worse quote because of the racial fear mongering of immigrants, of folks of color, of these people coming to take your jobs that if you can work, people who are already struggling into such a frenzy of fear, I think they're going to do things drastically vote for Trump because they think he's going to save the economy because that's what they're hearing, regardless of if that is even remotely true, and regardless of the fact that most white bodies are more likely to be climate refugees than they are to be billionaire friends withRebecca (48:59):So then what does resilience look like in the face of that kind of fearmongering?Jenny (49:24):This is maybe my nihilistic side. I don't know that things are going to get better before they get far worse. And I think that's where the resilience piece comes in. I was like, how do we hold on to our own humanity? How do we hold onto our communities? How do we hold onto hope in the reality that things will likely get worse and worse and worse before some type of reckoning or shift happens,Rebecca(50:23):Yeah. There's actually, I saw an Instagram post a couple months ago, and I want to say it was Bruce Springsteen and he was just lamenting the erosion of art and culture and music in this moment that there's not art in the Oval Office, that there's not, and just his sense that art and music and those kinds of expressions, actually, I don't think he used the word defiance, but that's the sentiment that I walked away with. That is a way to amplify our humanity in a way that invites proximity to cultures and people that are different than you. This whole argument that we're having right now about whether this election of Bad Bunny makes any sense and the different sort of arguments about what the different sides that people have taken on that, it's hilarious. And then there's something about it that feels very real.Danielle (51:31):Yeah, I had someone told me, I'm not watching it because he's a demonic Marxist. I was like, can you be a Marxist and be in the entertainment industry anyway? Clearly, we're going to have to talk about this again. I wrote an essay for good faith media and I was just, I couldn't wrap it up. And they're like, that's okay. Don't wrap it up. It's not meant to be wrapped up. So maybe that's how our conversation is too. I dunno. Jenny, what are you thinking?Jenny (52:13):I have many thoughts, mostly because I just watched one battle after another last night, and I don't want to give any spoilers away, but I feel like it was a really, it's a very million trigger warnings piece of art that I think encapsulates so much of what we're talking about and sort of this transgenerational story of resilience and what does it mean whether that is my own children or other children in this world to lean into, this probably isn't going to end with me. I'm probably not going to fix this. So how do we continue to maybe push the ball forward in the midst of the struggle for future generations? And I think I'm grateful for this space. I think this is one of the ways that we maybe begin to practice and model what proximity and difference and resilience can look like. And it's probably not always going to be easy or there's going to be struggles that probably come even as we work on engaging this together. And I'm grateful that we get to engage this together.Danielle (53:35):Well, we can always continue our thoughts next week. That's right. Yeah, Rebecca. Okay, I'll be locked in, especially because I said it in the podcast.Rebecca (53:48):I know. I do agree with that. Jenny, I particularly agree having this conversation, the three of us intentionally staying in each other's lives, checking on each other, checking in with each other, all that feels like this sort of defiant intentional resilience, particularly in a moment in history where things that have been our traditional expression of resilience have been cut off like it In recent US history, any major change happened, usually started on the college campus with public protests and public outcry, and those avenues have been cut off. It is no longer safe to speak out on a college campus. People are losing their degrees, they're getting kicked out of colleges, they're getting expelled from colleges for teachers are getting fired for expressing viewpoints that are not in line with the majority culture at this moment. And so those traditional avenues of resilience, I think it was an intentional move to go after those spaces first to shut down what we would normally do to rally collectively to survive a moment. And so I think part of what feels hard in this moment is we're having to reinvent them. And I think it's happening on a micro level because those are the avenues that we've been left with, is this sort of micro way to be resistant and to be resilient.Danielle (55:31):As you can see, we didn't finish our conversation this round, so check out the next episode. After this, we'll be wrapping up this conversation or at least continuing it. And at the end in the notes, their resources, I encourage you to connect with community, have conversations, give someone a hug that you trust and love and care for, and looking forward to having you join us.Kitsap County & Washington State Crisis and Mental Health ResourcesIf you or someone else is in immediate danger, please call 911.This resource list provides crisis and mental health contacts for Kitsap County and across Washington State.Kitsap County / Local ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They OfferSalish Regional Crisis Line / Kitsap Mental Health 24/7 Crisis Call LinePhone: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/24/7 emotional support for suicide or mental health crises; mobile crisis outreach; connection to services.KMHS Youth Mobile Crisis Outreach TeamEmergencies via Salish Crisis Line: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://sync.salishbehavioralhealth.org/youth-mobile-crisis-outreach-team/Crisis outreach for minors and youth experiencing behavioral health emergencies.Kitsap Mental Health Services (KMHS)Main: 360‑373‑5031; Toll‑free: 888‑816‑0488; TDD: 360‑478‑2715Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/Outpatient, inpatient, crisis triage, substance use treatment, stabilization, behavioral health services.Kitsap County Suicide Prevention / “Need Help Now”Call the Salish Regional Crisis Line at 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/Suicide-Prevention-Website.aspx24/7/365 emotional support; connects people to resources; suicide prevention assistance.Crisis Clinic of the PeninsulasPhone: 360‑479‑3033 or 1‑800‑843‑4793Website: https://www.bainbridgewa.gov/607/Mental-Health-ResourcesLocal crisis intervention services, referrals, and emotional support.NAMI Kitsap CountyWebsite: https://namikitsap.org/Peer support groups, education, and resources for individuals and families affected by mental illness.Statewide & National Crisis ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They Offer988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (WA‑988)Call or text 988; Website: https://wa988.org/Free, 24/7 support for suicidal thoughts, emotional distress, relationship problems, and substance concerns.Washington Recovery Help Line1‑866‑789‑1511Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesHelp for mental health, substance use, and problem gambling; 24/7 statewide support.WA Warm Line877‑500‑9276Website: https://www.crisisconnections.org/wa-warm-line/Peer-support line for emotional or mental health distress; support outside of crisis moments.Native & Strong Crisis LifelineDial 988 then press 4Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesCulturally relevant crisis counseling by Indigenous counselors.Additional Helpful Tools & Tips• Behavioral Health Services Access: Request assessments and access to outpatient, residential, or inpatient care through the Salish Behavioral Health Organization. Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/SBHO-Get-Behaviroal-Health-Services.aspx• Deaf / Hard of Hearing: Use your preferred relay service (for example dial 711 then the appropriate number) to access crisis services.• Warning Signs & Risk Factors: If someone is talking about harming themselves, giving away possessions, expressing hopelessness, or showing extreme behavior changes, contact crisis resources immediately.Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that. Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Danielle (00:20):Welcome to the Arise podcast, conversations about reality and talking a lot about what that means in the context of church, faith, race, justice, religion, all the things. Today, I'm so honored to have Sarah Van Gelder, a community leader, an example of working and continuing to work on building solidarity and networks and communication skills and settling into her lane. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Hey, Sarah, it's so good to be with you. And these are just casual conversations, and I do actual minimal editing, but they do get a pretty good reach, so that's exciting. I would love to hear you introduce yourself. How do you introduce yourself these days? Tell me a little bit about who you are. Okay.Sarah (01:14):My name is Sarah Van Gelder and I live in Bremer and Washington. I just retired after working for the Suquamish Tribe for six years, so I'm still in the process of figuring out what it means to be retired, doing a lot of writing, a certain amount of activism, and of course, just trying to figure out day to day, how to deal with the latest, outrageous coming from the administration. But that's the most recent thing. I think what I'm most known for is the founding yes magazine and being the editor for many years. So I still think a lot about how do we understand that we're in an era that's essentially collapsing and something new may be emerging to take its place? How do we understand what this moment is and really give energy to the emergence of something new? So those are sort of the foundational questions that I think about.Danielle (02:20):Okay. Those are big questions. I hadn't actually imagined that something new is going to emerge, but I do agree there is something that's collapsing, that's disintegrating. As you know, I reached out about how are we thinking about what is reality and what is not? And you can kind of see throughout the political spectrum or community, depending on who you're with and at what time people are viewing the world through a specific lens. And of course, we always are. We have our own lens, and some people allow other inputs into that lens. Some people are very specific, what they allow, what they don't allow. And so what do we call as reality when it comes to reality and politics or reality and faith or gender, sexuality? It's feeling more and more separate. And so that's kind of why I reached out to you. I know you're a thinker. I know you're a writer, and so I was wondering, as you think about those topics, what do you think even just about what I've said or where does your mind go?Sarah (03:32):Yeah. Well, at first when you said that was the topic, I was a little intimidated by it because it sounded a little abstract. But then I started thinking about how it is so hard right now to know what's real, partly because there's this very conscious effort to distort reality and get people to accept lies. And I think actually part of totalitarian work is to get people to just in the Orwellian book 1984, the character had to agree that two plus two equals five. And only when he had fully embraced that idea could he be considered really part of society.(04:14):So there's this effort to get us to accept things that we actually know aren't true. And there's a deep betrayal that takes place when we do that, when we essentially gaslight ourselves to say something is true when we know it's not. And I think for a lot of people who have, I think that's one of the reasons the Republican party is in such trouble right now, is because so many people who in previous years might've had some integrity with their own belief system, have had to toss that aside to adopt the lies of the Trump administration, for example, that the 2020 election was stolen. And if they don't accept those lies, they get rejected from the party. And once you accept those lies, then from then on you have betrayed yourself. And in many ways, you've betrayed the people who trust you. So it's a really tough dilemma sort of at that political level, even for people who have not bought into the MAGA mindset, or I do think of it as many people have described as a cult.(05:31):Now, even for people who have not bought into that, I think it's just really hard to be in a world where so many fundamental aspects of reality are not shared with people in your own family, in your own workplace, in your own community. I think it's incredibly challenging and we don't really know, and I certainly don't know how to have conversations. In fact, this is a question I wanted to ask you to have conversations across that line of reality because there's so much places where feelings get hurt, but there's also hard to reference back to any shared understanding in order to start with some kind of common ground. It feels like the ground is just completely unreliable. But I'd love to hear your thoughts about how you think about that.Danielle (06:33):It's interesting. I have some family members that are on the far, far, including my parent, well, not my parents exactly, but my father, and I've known this for a while. So prior to what happened in a couple weeks ago with the murder of an activist, I had spent a lot of time actually listening to that activist and trying to understand what he stood for, what he said, why my family was so interested in it. I spent time reading. And then I also was listening to, I don't know if you're familiar with the Midas Touch podcast? Yeah. So I listened to the Midas Brothers, and they're exact opposites. They're like, one is saying, you idiot, and the other one is like, oh, you're an idiot. And so when I could do it, when I had space to do it, it was actually kind of funny to me.(07:34):Sometimes I'm like, oh, that's what they think of someone that thinks like me. And that's when that guy says, calls them an idiot. I feel some resonance with that. So I did that a lot. However, practically speaking, just recently in the last couple months, someone reached out to me from across the political ideology line and said, Hey, wouldn't it be fun if we got together and talked? We think really differently. We've known each other for 20 years. Could you do that? So I said, I thought about it and I was like, yeah, I say this, I should act on it. I should follow through. So I said, okay, yeah, let's meet. We set up a time. And when you get that feeling like that person's not going to show up, but you're also feeling like, I don't know if I want them to show up.(08:24):Am I really going to show up? But it's kind of like a game of chicken. Well, I hung in there longer, maybe not because I wanted to show up, but just because I got distracted by my four kids and whatnot, and it was summer, and the other person did say, oh, I sprained my ankle. I can't have a conversation with you. I was like, oh, okay. And they were like, well, let me reschedule. So I waited. I didn't hear back from them, and then they hopped onto one of my Facebook pages and said some stuff, and I responded and I said, Hey, wait a minute. I thought we were going to have a conversation in person. And it was crickets, it was silence, it was nothing. And then I was tagged in some other comments of people that I would consider even more extreme. And just like, this is an example of intolerance.(09:13):And I was like, whoa, how did I get here? How did I get here? And like I said, I'm not innocent. I associate some of the name calling and I have those explicit feelings. And I was struck by that. And then in my own personal family, we started a group chat and it did not go well. As soon as we jumped into talking about immigration and ice enforcement and stuff after there were two sides stated, and then the side that was on the far right side said, well, there's no point in talking anymore. We're not going to convince each other. And my brother and I were like, wait a minute, can we keep talking? We're not going to convince each other, but how can we just stop talking? And it's just been crickets. It's been silence. There's been nothing. So I think as you ask me that, I just feel like deep pain, how can we not have the things I think, or my perception of what the other side believes is extremely harmful to me and my family. But what feels even more harmful is the fact that we can't even talk about it. There's no tolerance to hear how hurtful that is to us or the real impact on our day-to-day life. And I think this, it's not just the ideology, but it's the inability to even just have some empathy there. And then again, if you heard a guy like Charlie Kirk, he didn't believe in empathy. So I have to remember, okay, maybe they don't even believe in empathy. Okay, so I don't have an answer. What about you?Sarah (11:03):No, I don't either. Except to say that I think efforts that are based on trying to convince someone of a rational argument don't work because this is not about analysis or about rationality, it's about identity, and it's about deep feelings of fear and questions of worthiness. And I think part of this moment we're in with the empire collapsing, the empire that has shorn up so much of our way of life, even people who've been at the margins of it, obviously not as much, but particularly people who are middle class or aspiring to be middle class or upper, that has been where we get our sense of security, where we get our sense of meaning. For a lot of white people, it's their sense of entitlement that they get to have. They're entitled to certain kinds of privileges and ways of life. So if that's collapsing and I believe it is, then that's a very scary time and it's not well understood. So then somebody comes along who's a strong man like Trump and says, not only can I explain it to you, but I can keep you safe. I can be your vengeance against all the insults that you've had to live with. And it's hard to give that up because of somebody coming at you with a rational discussion.(12:36):I think the only way to give that up is to have something better or more secure or more true to lean into. Now that's really hard to do because part of the safety on the right is by totally rejecting the other. And so my sense is, and I don't know if this can possibly work, but my sense is that the only thing that might work is creating nonpolitical spaces where people can just get to know each other as human beings and start feeling that yes, that person is there for me when things are hard and that community is there for me, and they also see me and appreciate who I am. And based on that kind of foundation, I think there's some hope. And so when I think about the kind of organizing to be doing right now, a lot of it really is about just saying, we really all care about our kids and how do we make sure they have good schools and we all need some good healthcare, and let's make sure that that's available to everybody. And just as much as possible keeps it within that other realm. And even maybe not even about issues, maybe it's just about having a potluck and enjoying food together.Danielle (14:10):What structures or how do you know then that you're in reality? And do you have an experience of actually being in a mixed group like that with people that think wildly different than you? And how did that experience inform you? And maybe it's recently, maybe it's in the past. Yeah,Sarah (14:32):So in some respects, I feel like I've lived that way all my life,(14:44):Partly because I spent enough time outside the United States that when I came home as a child, our family lived in India for a year. And so when I came home, I just had this sense that my life, my life and my perceptions of the world were really different than almost everybody else around me, but the exception of other people who'd also spent a lot of time outside the us. And somehow we understood each other pretty well. But most of my life, I felt like I was seeing things differently. And I don't feel like I've ever really particularly gained a lot of skill in crossing that I've tended to just for a lot of what I'm thinking about. I just don't really talk about it except with a few people who are really interested. I don't actually know a lot about how to bridge that gap, except again, to tell stories, to use language that is non-academic, to use language that is part of ordinary people's lives.(16:01):So yes, magazine, that was one of the things that I focused a lot on is we might do some pretty deep analysis, and some of it might include really drawing on some of the best academic work that we could find. But when it came to what we were going to actually produce in the magazine, we really focused in on how do we make this language such that anybody who picks this up who at least feels comfortable reading? And that is a barrier for some people, but anybody who feels comfortable reading can say, yeah, this is written with me in mind. This is not for another group of people. This is written for me. And then part of that strategy was to say, okay, if you can feel that way about it, can you also then feel comfortable sharing it with other people where you feel like they're going to feel invited in and they won't feel like, okay, I'm not your audience.(16:57):I'm not somebody you're trying to speak to. So that's pretty much, I mean, just that whole notion of language and telling stories and using the age old communication as human beings, we evolved to learn by stories. And you can tell now just because you try to tell a kid some lesson and their eyes will roll, but if you tell them a story, they will listen. They won't necessarily agree, but they will listen and it will at least be something they'll think about. So stories is just so essential. And I think that authentic storytelling from our own experience that feels like, okay, I'm not just trying to tell you how you should believe, but I'm trying to say something about my own experience and what's happened to me and where my strength comes from and where my weaknesses and my challenges come from as well.Yeah, you mentioned that, and I was thinking about good stories. And so one of the stories I like to tell is that I moved to Suquamish, which is as an Indian reservation, without knowing really anything about the people I was going to be neighbors with. And there's many stories I could tell you about that. But one of them was that I heard that they were working to restore the ability to dig clams and dies inlet, which is right where silver Dial is located. And I remember thinking that place is a mess. You're never going to be able to have clean enough water because clams require really clean water. They're down filtering all the crap that comes into the water, into their bodies. And so you don't want to eat clams unless the water's very clean. But I remember just having this thought from my perspective, which is find a different place to dig clamps because that place is a mess.(19:11):And then years later, I found out it was now clean enough that they were digging clamps. And I realized that for them, spending years and years, getting the water cleaned up was the obvious thing to do because they think in terms of multiple generations, and they don't give up on parts of their water or their land. So it took years to do it, but they stayed with it. And so that was really a lesson for me in that kind of sense of reality, because my sense of reality is, no, you move on. You do what the pioneers did. One place gets the dust bowl and you move to a different place to farm. And learning to see from the perspective of not only other individuals, but other cultures that have that long millennia of experience in place and how that shifts things. It's almost like to me, it's like if you're looking at the world through one cultural lens, it's like being a one eyed person. You certainly see things, but when you open up your other eye and you can start seeing things in three dimensions, it becomes so much more alive and so much more rich with information and with possibilities.Danielle (20:35):Well, when you think about, and there's a lot probably, how do you apply that to today or even our political landscape? We're finding reality today.Sarah (20:48):Well, I think that the MAGA cult is very, very one eyed. And again, because that sense of safety and identity is so tied up in maintaining that they're not necessarily going to voluntarily open a second eye. But if they do, it would probably be because of stories. There's a story, and I think things like the Jimmy Kimmel thing is an example of that.(21:21):There's a story of someone who said what he believed and was almost completely shut down. And the reason that didn't happen is because people rose up and said, no, that's unacceptable. So I think there's a fundamental belief that's widespread enough that we don't shut down people for speech unless it's so violent that it's really dangerous. We don't shut people down for that. So I think when there's that kind of dissonance, I think there's sometimes an opening, and then it's really important to use that opening, not as a time to celebrate that other people were wrong and we were right, but to celebrate these values that free speech is really important and we're going to stand up for it, and that's who we are. So we get back to that identity. You can feel proud that you were part of this movement that helped make sure that free speech is maintained in the United States. Oh, that'sDanielle (22:26):Very powerful. Yeah, because one side of my family is German, and they're the German Mennonites. They settled around the Black Sea region, and then the other side is Mexican. But these settlers were invited by Catherine the Great, and she was like, Hey, come over here. And Mennonites had a history of non-violence pacifist movement. They didn't want to be conscripted into the German army. And so this was also attractive for them because they were skilled farmers and they had a place to go and Russia and farm. And so that's why they left Germany, to go to Russia to want to seek freedom of their religion and use their farming skills till the soil as well as not be conscripted into violent political movements. That's the ancestry of the side of my family that is now far.(23:29):And I find, and of course, they came here and when they were eventually kicked out, and part of that them being kicked out was then them moving to the Dakotas and then kicking out the native tribes men that were there on offer from the US government. So you see the perpetuation of harm, and I guess I just wonder what all of that cost my ancestors, what it cost them to enact harm that they had received themselves. And then there was a shift. Some of them went to World War II as conscientious objectors, a couple went as fighters.(24:18):So then you start seeing that shift. I'm no longer, I'm not like a pacifist. You start seeing the shift and then we're to today, I don't know if those black sea farmers that moved to Russia would be looking down and being good job. Those weren't the values it seems like they were pursuing. So I even, I've been thinking a lot about that and just what does that reality mean here? What separations, what splitting has my family had to do to, they changed from these deeply. To move an entire country means you're very committed to your values, uproot your life, even if you're farming and you're going to be good at it somewhere else, it's a big deal.Sarah (25:10):Oh, yeah. So it also could be based on fear, right? Because I think so many of the people who immigrated here were certainly my Jewish heritage. There is this long history of pilgrims and people would get killed. And so it wasn't necessarily that for a lot of people that they really had an option to live where they were. And of course, today's refugees, a lot of 'em are here for the same reason. But I think one of the things that happened in the United States is the assimilation into whiteness.(25:49):So as white people, it's obviously different for different communities, but if you came in here and you Irish people and Italians and so forth were despised at certain times and Jews and Quakers even. But over time, if you were white, you could and many did assimilate. And what did assimilate into whiteness? First of all, whiteness is not a culture, and it's kind of bereft of real meaning because the real cultures were the original Irish and Italian. But the other thing is that how you make whiteness a community, if you will, is by excluding other people, is by saying, well, we're different than these other folks. So I don't know if this applies to your ancestors or not, but it is possible that part of what their assimilation to the United States was is to say, okay, we are white people and we are entitled to this land in North Dakota because we're not native. And so now our identity is people who are secure on the land, who have title to it and can have a livelihood and can raise our children in security. That is all wrapped up in us not being native and in our government, keeping native people from reclaiming that land.(27:19):So that starts shifting over generations. Certainly, it can certainly shift the politics. And I think that plus obviously the sense of entitlement that so many people felt to and feel to their slave holding ancestors, that was a defensible thing to do. And saying it's not is a real challenge to somebody's identity.(27:51):So in that respect, that whole business that Trump is doing or trying to restore the Confederate statues, those were not from the time of slavery. Those were from after reconstruction. Those were part of the south claiming that it had the moral authority and the moral right to do these centuries long atrocities against enslaved people. And so to me, that's still part of the fundamental identity struggle we're in right now, is people saying, if I identify as white, yes, I get all this safety and all these privileges, but I also have this burden of this history and history that's continuing today, and how do I reconcile those two? And Trump says, you don't have to. You can just be proud of what you have perpetrated or what your ancestors perpetrated on other people.And I think there was some real too. I think there were people who honestly felt that they wanted to reconcile the, and people I think who are more willing to have complex thoughts about this country because there are things to be proud of, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the long history of protecting free speech and journalism and education for everyone and so forth. So there are definitely things to be proud of. And then there are things to recognize. We're incredibly violent and have had multiple generations of trauma resulting from it. And to live in this country in authenticity is to recognize that both are true and we're stuck with the history, but we're not stuck without being able to deal with that. We can do restitution and reparations and we can heal from that.Danielle (30:15):How do you stay connected even just to your own self in that dissonance that you just described?Sarah (30:30):Well, I think part of having compassion is to recognize that we're imperfect beings as individuals, but we're also imperfect as cultures. And so for me, I can live with, I mean, this is something I've lived with ever since I was in India, really. And I looked around and noticed that there were all these kids my own age who were impoverished and I was not. And that I knew I have enough to eat at the end of the day, and I knew that many of them would not have enough to eat. So it's always been a challenge for me. And so my response to that has been when I was a kid was, well, I don't understand how that happened. It's certainly not right. I don't understand how it could be, and I'm going to do my best to understand it, and then I'll do my part to try to change it. And I basically had the same view ever since then, which is there's only so much I can do, but I'll do everything I can, including examining my own complicity and working through issues that I might be carrying as somebody who grew up in a white supremacist culture, working on that internally, and then also working in community and working as an activist in a writer in any way I can think of that I can make a contribution.(31:56):But I really do believe that healing is possible. And so when I think about the people that are causing that I feel like are not dealing with the harm that they're creating, I still feel just somebody who goes to prison for doing a crime that's not the whole of who they are. And so they're going to have to ultimately make the choice about whether they're going to heal and reconcile and repair the damage they will have to make that choice. But for my part, I always want to keep that door open in my relationship with them and in my writing and in any other way, I want to keep the door open.Danielle (32:43):And I hear that, and I'm like, that's noble. And it's so hard to do to keep that door open. So what are some of the tools you use, even just on your own that help you keep that door open to conversation, even to feeling compassion for people maybe you don't agree with? What are some of the things, maybe their internal resources, external resources could be like, I don't know, somebody you read, go back to and read. Yeah. What helps you?Sarah (33:16):Well, the most important thing for me to keep my sanity is a combination of getting exercise and getting outside(33:27):And hanging out with my granddaughter and other people I love outside of political spaces because the political spaces get back into the stress. So yeah, I mean the exercise, I just feel like being grounded in our bodies is so important. And partly that the experience of fear and anxiety show up in our bodies, and we can also process them through being really active. So I'm kind of worried that if I get to the point where I'm too old to be able to really move, whether I'll be able to process as well. So there's that in terms of the natural world, this aliveness that I feel like transcends me and certainly humanity and just an aliveness that I just kind of open my senses to. And then it's sort, they call it forest bathing or don't have to be in a forest to do it, but just sort of allowing that aliveness to wash over me and to sort of celebrate it and to remember that we're all part of that aliveness. And then spending time with a 2-year-old is like, okay, anything that I may be hung up on, it becomes completely irrelevant to her experience.Danielle (35:12):I love that. Sarah, for you, even though I know you heard, you're still asking these questions yourself, what would you tell people to do if they're listening and they're like, and they're like, man, I don't know how to even start a conversation with someone that thinks different than me. I don't know how to even be in the same room them, and I'm not saying that your answers can apply to everybody. Mine certainly don't either, like you and me are just having a conversation. We're just talking it out. But what are some of the things you go to if you know you're going to be with people Yeah. That think differently than you, and how do you think about it?Sarah (35:54):Yeah, I mean, I don't feel particularly proud of this because I don't feel very capable of having a direct conversation with somebody who's, because I don't know how to get to a foundational level that we have in common, except sometimes we do. Sometimes it's like family, and sometimes it's like, what did you do for the weekend? And so it can feel like small talk, but it can also have an element of just recognizing that we're each in a body, in perhaps in a family living our lives struggling with how to live well. And so I usually don't try to get very far beyond that, honestly. And again, I'm not proud of that because I would love to have conversations that are enlightening for me and the other person. And my go-to is really much more basic than that.Maybe it is. And maybe it creates enough sense of safety that someday that other level of conversation can happen, even if it can't happen right away.Danielle (37:14):Well, Sarah, tell me if people are looking for your writing and know you write a blog, tell me a little bit about that and where to find you. Okay.Sarah (37:26):Yeah, my blog is called How We Rise, and it's on Substack. And so I'm writing now and then, and I'm also writing somewhat for Truth Out Truth out.org has adopted the Yes Archive, which I'm very grateful to them for because they're going to keep it available so people can continue to research and find articles there that are still relevant. And they're going to be continuing to do a monthly newsletter where they're going to draw on Yes, archives to tell stories about what's going on now. Yes, archives that are specifically relevant. So I recommend that. And otherwise, I'm just right now working on a draft of an op-ed about Palestine, which I hope I can get published. So I'm sort of doing a little of this and a little of that, but I don't feel like I have a clear focus. The chaos of what's going on nationally is so overwhelming, and I keep wanting to come back to my own and my own focus of writing, but I can't say that I've gotten there yet.Danielle (38:41):I hear you. Well, I hope you'll be back, and hopefully we can have more conversations. And just thanks a lot for being willing to just talk about stuff we don't know everything about.As always, thank you for joining us, and at the end of the podcast are notes and resources, and I encourage you to stay connected to those who are loving in your path and in your community. Stay tuned.Kitsap County & Washington State Crisis and Mental Health ResourcesIf you or someone else is in immediate danger, please call 911.This resource list provides crisis and mental health contacts for Kitsap County and across Washington State.Kitsap County / Local ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They OfferSalish Regional Crisis Line / Kitsap Mental Health 24/7 Crisis Call LinePhone: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/24/7 emotional support for suicide or mental health crises; mobile crisis outreach; connection to services.KMHS Youth Mobile Crisis Outreach TeamEmergencies via Salish Crisis Line: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://sync.salishbehavioralhealth.org/youth-mobile-crisis-outreach-team/Crisis outreach for minors and youth experiencing behavioral health emergencies.Kitsap Mental Health Services (KMHS)Main: 360‑373‑5031; Toll‑free: 888‑816‑0488; TDD: 360‑478‑2715Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/Outpatient, inpatient, crisis triage, substance use treatment, stabilization, behavioral health services.Kitsap County Suicide Prevention / “Need Help Now”Call the Salish Regional Crisis Line at 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/Suicide-Prevention-Website.aspx24/7/365 emotional support; connects people to resources; suicide prevention assistance.Crisis Clinic of the PeninsulasPhone: 360‑479‑3033 or 1‑800‑843‑4793Website: https://www.bainbridgewa.gov/607/Mental-Health-ResourcesLocal crisis intervention services, referrals, and emotional support.NAMI Kitsap CountyWebsite: https://namikitsap.org/Peer support groups, education, and resources for individuals and families affected by mental illness.Statewide & National Crisis ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They Offer988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (WA‑988)Call or text 988; Website: https://wa988.org/Free, 24/7 support for suicidal thoughts, emotional distress, relationship problems, and substance concerns.Washington Recovery Help Line1‑866‑789‑1511Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesHelp for mental health, substance use, and problem gambling; 24/7 statewide support.WA Warm Line877‑500‑9276Website: https://www.crisisconnections.org/wa-warm-line/Peer-support line for emotional or mental health distress; support outside of crisis moments.Native & Strong Crisis LifelineDial 988 then press 4Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesCulturally relevant crisis counseling by Indigenous counselors.Additional Helpful Tools & Tips• Behavioral Health Services Access: Request assessments and access to outpatient, residential, or inpatient care through the Salish Behavioral Health Organization. Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/SBHO-Get-Behaviroal-Health-Services.aspx• Deaf / Hard of Hearing: Use your preferred relay service (for example dial 711 then the appropriate number) to access crisis services.• Warning Signs & Risk Factors: If someone is talking about harming themselves, giving away possessions, expressing hopelessness, or showing extreme behavior changes, contact crisis resources immediately.Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that. Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Bio: Jenny - Co-Host Podcast (er):I am Jenny! (She/Her) MACP, LMHCI am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, Certified Yoga Teacher, and an Approved Supervisor in the state of Washington.I have spent over a decade researching the ways in which the body can heal from trauma through movement and connection. I have come to see that our bodies know what they need. By approaching our body with curiosity we can begin to listen to the innate wisdom our body has to teach us. And that is where the magic happens!I was raised within fundamentalist Christianity. I have been, and am still on my own journey of healing from religious trauma and religious sexual shame (as well as consistently engaging my entanglement with white saviorism). I am a white, straight, able-bodied, cis woman. I recognize the power and privilege this affords me socially, and I am committed to understanding my bias' and privilege in the work that I do. I am LGBTQIA+ affirming and actively engage critical race theory and consultation to see a better way forward that honors all bodies of various sizes, races, ability, religion, gender, and sexuality.I am immensely grateful for the teachers, healers, therapists, and friends (and of course my husband and dog!) for the healing I have been offered. I strive to pay it forward with my clients and students. Few things make me happier than seeing people live freely in their bodies from the inside out!Danielle (00:28):Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations based in what our reality is, faith, race, justice, gender in the church, therapy, all matter of things considered just exploring this topic of reality. Hey, I'm having this regular podcast co-host. Her name is Jenny McGrath. She's an M-A-C-P-L-M-H-C. She's dope. She's a licensed mental health counselor, a somatic experiencing practitioner, certified yoga teacher, and an approved supervisor in the state of Washington. She spent over a decade researching the ways in which the body can heal from trauma through movement and connection. And she's come to see that bodies are so important and she believes that by approaching the body with curiosity, we can begin to listen to the innate wisdom our body has to teach us. And that is where the magic happens. So I hope you're as thrilled as me to have such an amazing co-host join me. Yeah, we're going to talk about reality and therapy. We're just jumping in. Jenny and I are both writing books.Jenny, I think it's funny that we are good friends and we see each other when we're around each other, but then if not, we're always trading reels and often they're like parodies on real life. Funny things about real life that are happening, which I've been, the theme of my book is called Splitting, and I know you write about purity culture, and a part of that I think really has to do with what is our reality and how is it formed? And then that shapes what we do, how we act, how we behave in the world, how we relate to each other. So any thoughts on that? On Thursday, September 25th,Jenny (02:17):I mean, as you named that, I think 10 minutes before this started, I sent you a reel. There was a comedian singing Why She Doesn't Go to Therapy, and it says, all my friends that go to therapy are mean to me, and you don't have boundaries. You're just being an asshole. And it was good, but it was also existential. This was what seems to me a white woman. And I do think as a white woman who's a therapist, I feel existential a lot about the work I do in therapy and in healing spaces, and how we do this in a way that doesn't promote this hyper individualistic reality. And this idea that everything I see and everything I think is the way that it is, how do I stay open to more of a communal or collective way of knowing? And I think that that's a challenging thing. So that's something that comes to mind for me as you bring up Instagram reels.Danielle (03:26):Oh man, I have so many thoughts on that that I wasn't thinking before you said it, but I think they were all locked in a vault, been unleashed. No, seriously. You come from your own position in the world. Talk about your position and how did you come to that point of seeing more of a collective mindset or reality point of view?Jenny (03:47):I mean, honestly, I think a big part has been knowing you and working with you and knowing that I think we've had conversations over the years of both the privilege and the detriment that happens in a lot of white therapeutic spaces that say you just need detach from your family, from your community, from those who have harmed you. And I want to be very, very clear and very careful that obviously I do think that there are situations we need to extract ourselves from and remove ourselves from. And I think that can become disabling for bodies to, I've been having this thing play in my head lately where I'm like, are you healed? Or have you just cut off everyone that triggers you?Yeah, and I saw another, speaking of meme, it was like, I treat my trauma like Trump treats tariffs. I just implement boundaries arbitrarily, and they harm everyone.And so I think it's, there is a certain privilege that comes with being able to say, I'm just going to step away. I'm going to do my own thing. I'm going to do my healing journey. And I think there is a detriment to that and there's a loss. And I think we have co-evolved to be in community and to tell stories and to share reality and to hold reality in the tension of our space. I think about it as we each have a different lens. There's no objective reality, but if I can be open to your lens and you can be open to my lens, then we actually have two lenses, and then if we have five lenses or 10 lenses, we can have a much fuller picture of where we are rather than seeing the world through the really monochromatic white, patriarchal, Christian nationalist lens that we've been maybe conditioned, or at least I was conditioned to see the world through.Danielle (06:10):Yeah. Whoa. Yeah, I know we've talked about this so many times, and I think it just feels so present right now, especially as every moment it feels like every day. If you watch the news, if you don't take a break, I think you can be jarred at any moment or dissociated at any moment, or traumatized at any moment, or maybe feel a bit of joy too when someone says a smack down on your side of the issue. And I think that when we get in that mode of constantly being jarred and then we try to come into a healing space, it's like how do we determine then what is actually healing for us? What is actually good? What is actually wise? And I agree, I think if we're in a rhythm of being on our own, and I'm not criticizing, I mean, I get lonely and I'm part of a group, so I'm not speaking to loneliness particularly, but I'm speaking to the idea that no one else has input in your life, even the kind of input you may not agree with, but no one else is allowed to speak to you.(07:15):When I get in those spaces, it's not that I just feel lonely, I don't feel any hope. I don't feel any movement or any possibility because let's say that this ends tomorrow, that authoritarian regime magically ends. It's healed tomorrow. We're going to have to look at all of our people in our lives and face them and decide what we're going to do. I mean, that's what I think about a lot. At the end of the day, I might sit next to someone that hates me or that I perhaps might have rage and anger towards them. What are we going to do? So I don't know, when you talk about the different lenses, I'm not sure how that all mixes together. I don't have an answer, basically. Shoot.Jenny (08:05):But I also think that that's part of maybe how we hold reality is maybe it is more about presence and being with what is, rather than having an answer, I think I become more and more skeptical of anyone who says they have an answer for anything.Danielle (08:31):So I mean, there was this guy that recently passed away, and there was, on one hand I wanted to really talk about it, and on the other hand, I didn't want to talk about it because it took up so much space. And I feel that even as we start to talk about how do we form healing spaces in therapy with that, I think, what did you call it that, what kind of lens did you say? It was like a monochromatic lens. How do we talk about that without centering it?Jenny (09:08):I think one thing that comes to mind is holding it in context of all of the other deaths that have not taken up that space. And the social studies phrase, what are the conditions of possibility that have enabled this death to create church services happening that have taken over people's social media, people who have been silent about lots of different deaths in the last year or five years, all of a sudden can't help but become really vigilant about talking about this. I think for me, it helps to zoom back and go, how come? Why is this so prevalent? Why is this so loud? What is this illuminating or what is this unearthing about? What's already been here?So I grew up in very fundamentalist, white evangelical Christianity. And from the time I was eight, nine years old, I had in me messages instilled of martyrdom, whether that was a message that I should be a martyr, or whether that was a message that Christians were already being martyred, whether that was the war against Christmas with Starbucks cups or not having prayers happen at school. And these things where I grew up in this world where we were supposed to be prominent, we were supposed to be prevalent, we were supposed to be protected. And whenever there was any challenge to that from bodies that weren't white or straight or Christian or American, there became this very real frenzy around martyrdom. And I think on an interpersonal level and on a collective level, someone who plays the victim will always hold the most power in the relational dynamic. And so I think that this moment was a very useful moment to that psyche and that reality of seeing the world as a victim, as a martyr, as being persecuted, regardless of the fact that evangelical Christians are the strongest floating block in our nation. They have incredible privilege when it comes to a lot of education, marriage inequality, things like that, that are from the long lineage of Christian nationalism in our country.Danielle (12:15):So then how do you work with folks that are coming in with that lens, and what's the responsibility of our field? I know you and I can't answer that question necessarily, but we can just say from our own experience what that's like. Are you willing to share a little bit of that?What would I say? My client load is mixed and so do a lot of work, but just because it's mixed doesn't mean that I'm not currently undoing that process in myself as well. So I think just as much as therapy is about whoever comes into my office or shows up in the zoom room or even a group or a teaching we've been a part of, I think it's, well, I mean we say this co-created, but I actually mean it means I have to keep learning. I have to keep trying to be in my body. And what I mean by that is I was talking to my friend Phil yesterday, and he was like, Danielle, are you tracking your body sensations? And he's like, I just challenge you to do that today. And I was like, man, that that's a good reminder. So I think one way I try to come with clients is from the perspective of I don't know it all.(13:38):I only know what I'm feeling and sensing in this moment, and I have that to offer along with other things I've studied, of course. But just because the person sitting with me doesn't have a degree or the group and the people, doesn't mean they don't know just as much as me. It's just another form of maybe learning or knowing or presence and healing. And then we're figuring that out together. I see that as one way of undoing, undoing this. I know everything point of view, which I kind of felt like I had to have when I came out of grad school. Yeah,Jenny (14:14):Yeah, totally. Yeah, I feel similar and I think often think in quotes. And so one of my favorite quotes is by Simone Devo, and she says, without a doubt, it is always more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation. And so I am consistently asking, where is my blind bondage? Who are the people in my life that will show me where my blind bondage is? Who are the people that will hold me accountable to my own liberation? And for me as a therapist, I work primarily with white folks who grew up in fundamental Christianity. And over 10 years of doing that work, I think that a primary part of my work is radical agency(15:13):Because I think that particularly white bodies maintain privilege by abdicating our agency and by being compliant with the systems that give us power and give us privilege. And so I think for me, my ethic is how do I help clients come into contact with their radical agency? And so a big part of that that I think is important is consent. And so if someone is coming to work with me, it's part of my disclosure form, it's part of my intake to say, I don't think our mental health concerns or our somatic concerns exist in a bubble. They are deeply impacted by the systems we move through. And so while we'll be engaging your individual body, we're also going to be engaging the collective structures. And I've had people say, no, I don't want to do that work. And I say, great, there are other lovely therapists that will work with you and be a better fit. That's just not the type of therapy I do. That's not within my scope of practice to only focus on the individual, because for me, that's unethical.Danielle (16:23):Oh, that's cool. I like that, Jenny. I think that a lot. I was consulting recently, and we're just talking about this current moment, and I'll just say from my point of view that even in my family, I noticed when something had gone on locally, we have some organizing that we do and we had some warnings go out. And I noticed even in my own family, the heightened anxiety, the alert, and one of the things we had to do was we took turns driving around just making sure everybody's safe and everybody was safe. And I came down and at the point where people began to lower anxiety, and we're talking about just regular business owners, regular people out there, we're not even talking about immigrants, quote migrants. We're just talking about people out there that don't want to encounter force. You could feel the anxiety just lower now that we went the parking lot's clear, no one's here, we're safe. This isn't happening, not today. I'm not saying it won't happen here in our area of the country, but it's not happening today. And I realized in consultation later about clients and stuff that things are going to, but the clinician I was consulting with just said to me, she said to me, just for your family, she's like, that anxiety is warranted. That's real. You're supposed to feel anxious. There's no way you can take that away for those people and you shouldn't.(18:02):And so just kind of learning, reminding myself, when you go to grad school, when you study therapy and psychology, there's pathological, there's diagnoses, all these things, but then there's some things like we just can't take away. They're part of the experience. They need to be there. They're part of the warning. And there's a reason why when you get out and do something practical for a community, the anxiety lowers. And I think that just gave me a lot of insight, not just for my client, but for my family and for myself. And there's some calm, not because I'm anxious, but because, oh, I'm not crazy. I'm not just making this up. And so I do think that speaks to how the system is creating trauma and it is powerless. What can we do against the big bad authorities? And we can do things, we can connect, we can be with people, but at some level, that baseline of anxiety is going to be there because it's warranted. That's how I think of it.What do we do? Well, we sat at home, we watched sports. We went to Best Buy, and this is not every, we had some privilege. We bought an extra controller to play Mario World or whatever it was. I don't remember, but I was like, I'm not playing on that little controller. They wanted me to hold. I was like, I need a real controller. I'm old. I need to be able to feel it in my hands. Just silly stuff. Just didn't put pressure on the kids to do homework. Not a pressure to clean the house, just to just exist. Just be, yeah. What about you? What do you do when you encounter either anxiety from trauma like that or the systemic pressure maybe to even conform to whiteness or privilege in that moment?Jenny (20:12):I typically need to move my body in some way, whether that's to take my dog on a very long walk or whether that's just to roll around on a dance floor or maybe do a yoga practice. I become aware of how my body is holding that, and I think about how emotions are just energy in motion. And so if we don't give them motion and expression, it becomes like a battery pack in our nervous system. And so I can feel that if I haven't been able to move and to express whatever my body needs to express, and often I don't even know cognitively what my body needs to express, but I've grown in trust that my body knows, and I say, I think the sillier we look the better it usually feels. I just saw this lovely post the other day, a movement person did where they, we talk a lot about brainwashing, but we don't talk a lot about body washing, and we are so conditioned to only move our body in certain ways. And because our body is not different than our brain, I think that the more free we feel in our actual physical body to our own ability, the more that can actually create a little bit more mobility in how we see reality and how we engage with it.Danielle (21:44):So take that back to the beginning where you started talking about how when you have clients come in, you're like, yo, we're going to address this systemically and collectively. What do you do with folks when they have that kind of energy and you guys are working through it and it's like, oh, it's like maybe that's collective energy. What do you do? Yeah,Jenny (22:02):Yeah. I ask my clients probably annoying amount of times each session, what do you notice right now? And then I follow their body. So if their body says like, oh, I feel a lot of tension in my gut instead of alleviating that, I go, okay, great. Can you actually exaggerate that tension a little bit and see what happens? See if that tension wants to come out in a snarl or a growl, or maybe you want to curl up in a ball and I just follow whatever the impulses of their body are. Or if they say like, oh, I feel a lot in my shoulders. I'm like, great. Do you want to go push against a wall or push against the floor or punch a pillow and let your body actually get some movement into those spaces that you're sensing?Well, as I said, I'm very skeptical about individual work, even though I do it, I don't think is all that. I think it is both necessary and not that helpful for the collective(23:21):Because it is individual. And so I actually do think we need collective spaces of moving and expressing and being in our bodies. I think our ancestors knew this for before Christian supremacy and then white supremacy and then capitalistic supremacy eradicated how we've evolved to move in our and collectively. That being said, I do think that the more we become aware of how our body is constrained and how we've been socialized, especially I think for anybody, but for me, I'll speak to white bodies, we aren't always conscious. We take for granted whiteness and how it affects our bodies. So the first time I'm asking a white person, especially maybe a white woman to look pissed, that's going to be probably really scary because socially we are not actually allowed to be pissed. We're allowed to be dams, souls, and we're allowed to freak out, but we're not actually allowed to be strong and be powerful and be angry. And so I do believe that in that work of individual liberation and freedom, it actually helps us resist those roles and those performances of white womanhood that then perpetuate collective harm.Danielle (24:49):I can see how that shift would really impact the way one person both connects with their neighbor or a different person, even same race or same culture, and would impact not only how they relate and connect to that person, but also just how they might love.Jenny (25:10):Yeah, because I think it is dangerous. It is disproportionately dangerous to oppressed bodies when white women aren't holding our own anger because I think that there is a deferral to the police, to governing bodies to different authorities when a white woman is actually pissed, rather than saying like, Hey, you did this and it pissed me off, let's work it out here. Oftentimes that ends up actually getting policed to authorities that then disproportionately harm oppressed bodies. And so I think it is essential for white women to grow our capacity to bear. No, I actually am pissed and I can acknowledge that and engage that and be with it in myself.I do. I do actually. So I have been working on a book for the last six years in which I'm looking at the socialization of young white women in purity culture and this political moment of Invisible children, which was this documentary style film that manipulated an entire generation of young white women to get involved in missions or development. And so as part of my research, I interviewed many white women who grew up in purity culture and became missionaries. And there were some that maybe still had good relations with organizations such as invisible children and felt threatened or maybe pissed that I was inquiring into this. And so instead of engaging and talking about the emotions that were coming up, they went straight to interrogating my IRB and then went straight to is this research ethical? Even though I could tell they were really just angry and upset about what I was interrogating, and I would've much rather we could have that conversation than this quick sense of I'm going to go to the structures while I can maintain feeling like this demure pleasantness of white womanhood, even though I could feel the energy. And that's an example for me, and I have white privilege, and so there was still threat there, but it was not probably to the same degree that it could be if I didn't hold that same power and privilege that I do.Scared. I felt really scared and I had done everything ethically. I had hired my own IRB to oversee my research. I did their protocol and still I felt the wielding of power and the sense of I can move the system to act against you if I don't like what you're doing. And so it was really, really scary. And then I had to move my anxiety and my body and I had to shake because what I do often when I get scared and I had to let my body discharge that adrenaline and that cortisol, and then I was able to back to myself and respond and say, it sounds like you have some concerns, and being interviewed is totally optional so you don't have to do it. And then I never heard back from 'em, and so it was just helpful for me to get to move that through. Even in part of that process,Danielle (29:27):Jenny, is that energy still in you now or is it gong?Jenny (29:30):Oh yeah, totally. I can feel my body vibrating and even there's that fear of like, oh shit, what's going to happen if I talk about this? I can feel the silencingThe demand to be small and not to expose it because then I'm open to fill in the blank. And so I can feel the sense of how power wants to keep us from speaking truth to power and to those that wield it.Danielle (30:02):Man, I want to swear so bad, motherfucker. I'm not surprised. But I do think I continue to allow myself to be shocked. And I think the thing is, I know this can happen. I know it will happen. I think both you and I are writing on topics that are very interrogate this moment in a very particular way that's threatening. And so although I'm not surprised, I am allowing myself to continually be shocked, not I want to re-traumatize myself, but I don't want to lose the feeling of there might be somebody good out there, this might be well received. And also I want to maintain that feeling of like, man, I really love my friend. I believe in her. And I think allowing myself to kind of hold all those things kind of just allows me to wake up for the moment versus just numbing out to it. Man,So vicious. It's so vicious because you aren't taking their money, you aren't literally hurting them physically. You're not taking their power, and yet there's this full force. You've dedicated your life to this thing and they could take you out.Jenny (31:19):Yeah, and I think it's primarily because I am questioning white women's innocence and I think based on how race and gender work, a white woman's privilege and power comes from this presumed purity and innocence. And so if we start to disrupt that and go, actually, I'm human and I've done some shit and I've, I've caused harm and I will cause harm, and that's actually a really important part of me working out my humanity. Then I'm stepping out of the bounds of being protected under white patriarchy.Danielle (32:06):I feel like I learned, I feel like so much resonance with that. I've had many similar experiences, but one stands out where right after the election I talked with a friend of mine on the phone, and I don't remember if she is a white colleague from same grad school and said something like, oh, it's just a bummer. And we didn't really talk about it. And I was like, that's all you could say. I thought about that. And later I sent a really kind text saying, Hey, that really hurt my feelings. I don't know. It doesn't make sense why we haven't talked about it more. And then I didn't hear back. It just went silent. This is someone I'd known for seven years.(32:45):Then later I called and I was like, Hey, what's up? And they're like, I can't believe you would write that to me If I ever engage you again, I want to start here. Some other random place. I was just sat back and I was like, I'm not giving this any more energy at that time. I said that to myself and it was just like the complete collapse when I said, you hurt my feelings, the complete collapse. When I said, I don't understand this, can we talk about it? And then I went through this period this summer of just having this feeling. I don't want to be at odds with people. So I left this person a voicemail saying, Hey man, can we talk? I haven't heard back from them, but I feel like I did my part. But I'm just struck it even in down from the big view, like the 30,000 foot view or how that person wants to reign the system on you to even interpersonally, if I don't like what you said, I'm just going to remove my presence,Jenny (33:51):Which I think again, is so much of the epidemic of whiteness. And I think it then produces such a fragility that's like I don't actually know how to bear open conflict and disruption because I'm not practiced at it, and I just will escape every time someone calls me to accountability or says something I don't like. And we can't stay in that place of tension.Yeah. Well, I think one is that I feel those tendencies so much in my own body, and I do think that we have capacity to metabolize them. And so I literally might say something like, great, could you let your body get up and run around the room or run in place? Or maybe you stay seated but you let your legs and your arms kick. And they think that if we even just let ourselves express I want to fight, or if I want to flee or I want to get away from this and we let our body do what we need to do, we can then come back to ourselves and have fuller access to our capacity. And again, sometimes I do think there are relationships or communities or things that we do need to step away from. And sometimes if we've only ever learned to say yes, we might go through a process where we swing to the other side and we just cut everyone out and then we get to learn how to have discernment and how to enter into relationships thoughtfully and how to know who are those people we will be investing in probably for a long time.(35:43):And so it's not denying that those impulses are there, but it's letting our bodies metabolize them and work through them. And it makes me think of res, menkin talks about dirty pain versus clean pain, and I think dirty pain is just like, this hurts. I'm going to avoid it. And just disconnect and dissociate clean pain is like this hurts and I'm going to press into it and I'm going to see what it can teach me and how I can grow into a stronger, more mature person through this process.Danielle (36:16):Man, that sounds like some good work you could do with somebody. I think the thing about therapy, coming back to what you said at the beginning is I think we want a quick answer. We want, we want to go to a retreat, we want to show up at the gym. In my case, I go to the gym often. We want to go somewhere, we want to feel like we did it, we accomplished it. And often at the gym, I can hear my coaches are saying just little steps. Every week and above doing lots of weight, it's showing up as much as you can, being consistent. And I kind of hear that in a little bit of what you're saying. It's not like getting to the end right away. It's tracking your body and the sensations and showing up for yourself even in that way.Jenny (37:08):And I think even like that, I love that analogy. I often say relationships are like muscles. They're only as strong as the ruptures that they can handle. And stronger muscles have had more and more and more and more ruptures. We build muscle through tearing and rebuilding. And I think that that's the same with relationship too. But if we've never torn, then we're so afraid of what's going to happen. If there is a rupture,Danielle:I don't know that we're going to heal that, but someone recently said the system is collapsing. It really is. It's coming down on itself. And I think really it's going to come down to the work that you talked about at the beginning, however people are choosing to see it. But one way you talked about it was that monochromatic lens and adding a lens, adding a lens. And I do think the challenge for all of us, even to form something new, whether that means new government, I don't know what it means, but just even a new way of being together set the government aside. It means really forming, adding lenses to ourselves. Jenny, I hope you're coming back to talk to me again.It's okay. Where can they find your stuff? Tell me.Jenny (38:42):Yeah, so I'm on Instagram at indwell movement, and then my website is indwell movement.com. So find me at either of those places, email me, reach out, send a message, would love to connect.Danielle (38:59):Okay, cool. Well, that's a wrap on this episode. If you can share, download, subscribe, tune into what we're talking about. But more important, have a conversation with a friend, a colleague, a neighbor, challenge your therapist, challenge your family. Don't forget to keep talking. And at the end of the show notes are resources, just some resources. They aren't the end all, be all of resources, but I'm putting 'em in there because I want you to know it's important to do resourcing for ourselves. As always, thank you for joining us, and at the end of the podcast are notes and resources, and I encourage you to stay connected to those who are loving in your path and in your community. Stay tuned.  Crisis Resources:Kitsap County & Washington State Crisis and Mental Health ResourcesIf you or someone else is in immediate danger, please call 911.This resource list provides crisis and mental health contacts for Kitsap County and across Washington State.Kitsap County / Local ResourcesResource Contact Info What They OfferSalish Regional Crisis Line / Kitsap Mental Health 24/7 Crisis Call Line Phone: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/ 24/7 emotional support for suicide or mental health crises; mobile crisis outreach; connection to services.KMHS Youth Mobile Crisis Outreach Team Emergencies via Salish Crisis Line: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://sync.salishbehavioralhealth.org/youth-mobile-crisis-outreach-team/ Crisis outreach for minors and youth experiencing behavioral health emergencies.Kitsap Mental Health Services (KMHS) Main: 360‑373‑5031; Toll‑free: 888‑816‑0488; TDD: 360‑478‑2715Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/ Outpatient, inpatient, crisis triage, substance use treatment, stabilization, behavioral health services.Kitsap County Suicide Prevention / “Need Help Now” Call the Salish Regional Crisis Line at 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/Suicide-Prevention-Website.aspx 24/7/365 emotional support; connects people to resources; suicide prevention assistance.Crisis Clinic of the Peninsulas Phone: 360‑479‑3033 or 1‑800‑843‑4793Website: https://www.bainbridgewa.gov/607/Mental-Health-Resources Local crisis intervention services, referrals, and emotional support.NAMI Kitsap County Website: https://namikitsap.org/ Peer support groups, education, and resources for individuals and families affected by mental illness.Statewide & National Crisis ResourcesResource Contact Info What They Offer988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (WA‑988) Call or text 988; Website: https://wa988.org/ Free, 24/7 support for suicidal thoughts, emotional distress, relationship problems, and substance concerns.Washington Recovery Help Line 1‑866‑789‑1511Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resources Help for mental health, substance use, and problem gambling; 24/7 statewide support.WA Warm Line 877‑500‑9276Website: https://www.crisisconnections.org/wa-warm-line/ Peer-support line for emotional or mental health distress; support outside of crisis moments.Native & Strong Crisis Lifeline Dial 988 then press 4Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resources Culturally relevant crisis counseling by Indigenous counselors.Additional Helpful Tools & Tips• Behavioral Health Services Access: Request assessments and access to outpatient, residential, or inpatient care through the Salish Behavioral Health Organization. Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/SBHO-Get-Behaviroal-Health-Services.aspx• Deaf / Hard of Hearing: Use your preferred relay service (for example dial 711 then the appropriate number) to access crisis services.• Warning Signs & Risk Factors: If someone is talking about harming themselves, giving away possessions, expressing hopelessness, or showing extreme behavior changes, contact crisis resources immediately.Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that. Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

BioPhil Allen, Jr., PhD is a theologian and ethicist whose research and writings include the intersections of social structure, race, culture, and theology and ethics of justice. He has authored two books: Open Wounds: A Story of Racial Tragedy, Trauma, and Redemption and The Prophetic Lens: The Camera and Black Moral Agency From MLK to Darnella Frazier. He is an affiliate assistant professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, a poet, and documentary filmmaker. Dr. Allen is also founder of the nonprofit Racial Solidarity Project based in Pasadena, CA. As a former Division 1 college basketball player, he has enjoyed opportunities as a guest chaplain for college and professional sports teams.Phil Allen Jr., PhDAffiliate Assistant Professor | Fuller Theological SeminaryPresident: Racial Solidarity Project (RSP)Philallenjr.com | openwoundsdoc.comInstagram: @philallenjrig | @the_rspThreads: @philallenjrigFacebook: Phil Allen, Jr.Substack: @philallenjrLinkedIn: @philallenjrWelcome to the Arise podcast, conversations in Reality centered on our same themes, faith, race, justice, gender in the church. So happy to welcome my buddy and a colleague, just a phenomenal human being. Dr. Phil Allen, Jr. He has a PhD. He's a theologian and an ethicist whose research and writings include intersections of social structure, race, culture, and theology, and the ethics of justice. He has also authored two books, open Wounds, A Story of Racial Tragedy, trauma and Redemption, and the Prophetic Lens, the Camera and the Black Moral Agency from MLK to Dan Darnell Frazier. He's an affiliate assistant professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, a poet and a documentary filmmaker. Dr. Allen is also founder of the nonprofit Racial Solidarity Project based in Pasadena, California as a former division one college basketball player. Yes, he has enjoyed opportunities as a guest chaplain for college and professional sports. Hey, you're not going to be disappointed. You're going to find questions, curiosity ways to interact with the material here. Please just open up your mindset and your heart to what is shared today, and I encourage you to share and spread the word. Hey, Phil. Here we find ourselves back again talking about similar subjects.Danielle (00:18):Welcome to the Arise podcast, conversations in Reality centered on our same themes, faith, race, justice, gender in the church. So happy to welcome my buddy and a colleague, just a phenomenal human being. Dr. Phil Allen, Jr. He has a PhD. He's a theologian and an ethicist whose research and writings include intersections of social structure, race, culture, and theology, and the ethics of justice. He has also authored two books, open Wounds, A Story of Racial Tragedy, trauma and Redemption, and the Prophetic Lens, the Camera and the Black Moral Agency from MLK to Dan Darnell Frazier. He's an affiliate assistant professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, a poet and a documentary filmmaker. Dr. Allen is also founder of the nonprofit Racial Solidarity Project based in Pasadena, California as a former division one college basketball player. Yes, he has enjoyed opportunities as a guest chaplain for college and professional sports. Hey, you're not going to be disappointed. You're going to find questions, curiosity ways to interact with the material here. Please just open up your mindset and your heart to what is shared today, and I encourage you to share and spread the word. Hey, Phil. Here we find ourselves back again talking about similar subjects.Unfortunately. Well, how are you coming in today? How is your body? How's your mind? How are you coming in? Just first of all,Phil Allen Jr. (01:51):I am coming in probably in one of the best places, spaces in a long time. The last two days have been very, very encouraging and uplifting, having nothing to do with what's happening in the world. I turned 52, I told you I turned 52 yesterday. So whenever I see the happy birthdays and the messages, text messages, social media messages, literally it just lifts me up. But in that, I also had two people share something that I preached. Oh, 10 years ago, what? And one other person, it was 17 years ago, something I taught that came full circle. One person used it in a message for a group of people, and the other person was just saying, 10 years ago, about 10 years ago, you preached a message that was, it impacted me seriously. He didn't know who I was, and he the dots, and he realized, oh, that's the guy that preached when we went to that. And so that, to me, it was so encouraging to hear thoseBecause you never know where your messages land, how impactful they are, and for people to bring that up. That just had me light. Then I did 20 miles, so physically 20I feel great after that. I'm not sore. I'm not tired. I could go run right now, another 10, but I'm not. Okay. Okay, good. Today is rest day good? Yes, I did a crim community resiliency model present workshop.I dunno if you're familiar with, are you familiar with crim?Crim was developed by Trauma Resource Institute here in Claremont, California by Elaine Miller Carra, and they go around the world. They have trainees and people around the world that go into places that just experienced traumatic eventsThe tsunami in Indonesia to school shootings around the country. So here, obviously we had the fires from January, and so we did a workshop to help. What it is is helping people develop the skills, practical skills. There are six skills to regulate the nervous systems, even in the moments. I was certified in 2020 to do that, and so I did a co-led presentation. It was great, very well received. I had fun doing it. So empowering to give people these skills. I use them every day, resourcing, just like when you asked me, how are you in your body? So for a moment, I have to track, I have to notice what's going on with my body. That's the firstSo we teach people those skills and it is just the last few days, Monday, Tuesday, and today already. I just feel light and it's no coincidence I didn't watch the news at all yesterday.Okay. Even on social media, there's no coincidence. I feel light not having engaged those things. So I feel good coming in this morning.Danielle (05:32):Okay, I like that. Well, I know I texted you, I texted you a couple months ago. I was like, let's record a podcast. And then as you alluded to, the world's kept moving at a rapid pace and we connected. And I've been doing a lot of thinking for a long time, and I know you and I have had conversations about what does it look like to stay in our bodies, be in our bodies in this time, and I've been thinking about it, how does that form our reality? And as you and I have talked about faith, I guess I'm coming back to that for you, for how you think about faith and how it informs your reality, how you're in reality, how you're grounding yourself, especially as you alluded to. We do know we can't be involved every second with what's happening, but we do know that things are happening. So yeah, just curious, just open up the conversation like that.Phil Allen Jr. (06:28):Yeah, I think I'm going to go back to your first question. I think your first question you asked me sets the tone for everything. And I actually answered this similarly to someone yesterday when you said, how are you in your body? And for me, that's the first I've learned, and a lot of it has to do with community resiliency model that I just talked about, to pay attention to what's going on in my body. That tells me a lot. That tells me if I'm good, I can't fake it. You can fake how you feel. You can fake and perform what you think, but you can't with the sensations and the response of your body to different circumstances, that's going to be as real, as tangible. So I pay attention first to that. That tells me how much I'm going to engage a subject matter. It tells me how much I want to stay in that space, whether it's the news, whether it's conversation with someone. My body tells me a lot now, and I don't separate that from my faith. We can go through biblical narrative and we can see where things that are going on physically with someone is addressed or is at least acknowledged. It is just not in the forefront emphasized. So we don't think that paying attention to what's going on in your body matters,When you have that dualistic approach to faith where the soul is all that matters. Your body is just this flesh thing. No, God created all of it. Therefore, all of it's valuable and we need to pay attention to all of it. So that's the first place I start. And then in terms of faith, I'm a realist. I'm a Christian realist, so I put things in perspective. The love ethic of Jesus is an ideal. Scripture is an ideal. It's telling us when you look at Christ, Jesus is the son of God. Jesus is also called the son of man. And from my understanding and my learnings, son of man refers to the human one, the ideal human one, right? He is divinity, but he's deity, but he's also a human, and he's the human that we look to for the ideal way to live. And so this perfect ideal of love, the love ethic of Jesus, I believe it's unattainable on this side of heaven. I think we should always strive to love our enemies. But how many people actually love their enemies? Bless them. I saw what Eric, I think his name, first name is Erica Kirk forgave theOkay? I'm not here to judge whether that's real or if she felt obligated because I know some Christians, they wrestle because they feel obligated to forgive almost immediately. I don't feel that obligation if my body is not in a place where I can just say, I forgive you. I need to get to a place where I can forgive. But let's just say it's very real. She is. I forgive this young man. How many people can do that? We admire it. How many Christians will just say, I forgive, genuinely say, I forgive the person who killed my children's father. So it's not that it can't be done, but sustained. There are few people who could do what in terms of relative to how many people in the world, what Mother Teresa did. There are few people who can do that. There are few people who could do what Martin Luther King did who could practice non-violence, risk, jail and life and limb for an extended period of time. So I'm not saying it can't be done, but sustained by many or the most of us. I just don't believe that's realistic. I believe it's always something we aspire to. And we're always challenged throughout life to live up to that ideal. But we're going to fall short probably more often than we want to admit.(11:12):So I don't try to put the pressure on myself to be this perfect Christian. I try to understand where I am in my maturity in this particular area. There's some things I can do better than others, and then I go from there. So I look at what's happening in the world through that lens. How would I really respond? There are people I don't want to deal with. They are toxic and harmful to me because here's the other part, there's also wisdom. That's faith too.Holy Spirit, when the Holy Spirit comes, the Holy Spirit shall come upon you, shall lead you in. I'm paraphrasing a bit, but the Holy Spirit shall lead you. No, the spirit of wisdom is what I'm trying to get to in John. This Holy Spirit is called the spirit of wisdom. Holy Spirit is going to lead you into all truth, but it's also called the spirit of wisdom.Is faith too. And it is there no one way of doing things.It's where I feel the most settled, even if I don't want to do something.I went through a divorce separated 10 years ago, divorce finalized a couple of years later. And I wanted so badly to share my story through people at my former church, family, friends. I wanted to tell, let me tell what happened. I never had peace about that in my body. My body never felt settled.Settled, okay.Because I knew I was doing it from a place of wanting to get vindication, maybe revenge. It wasn't just as innocent as, let me tell my side of the story, if I'm honest.It was, I'm going to throw you under the bus.But in that moment, I didn't because I didn't feel settled in my spirit. People say settled in my spirit. Really, it is also my body that I should do that wisdom says, let God handle it. Let God bring it to the surface. In due time, people will know who need to know. You don't have to take revenge. When they go low, you go high. In that moment, that's what I felt at peace to do. And I don't regret it to this day. I don't regret it. I'm glad I didn't because it would just been even more messy.I have conversations with my grandmother who's no longer with us, or I recall conversations we had. So when I was young, and I tell people unapologetically, I'm a mama's boy and a grandmama's boy. Women played a significant role raising me. So I'm close to mom, grandma, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, my sisters, and I'm the oldest of all my siblings, but women. So my grandmother, rather than going out to parties a lot, I would prefer to go to her house. I lived in high school with one grandmother, but sometimes I would go to my other grandmother's house and just sit and she would have a glass of wine, and we would just talk for hours. And she would tell me stories When she was young,Would ask her questions. I miss, and I loved those times. An external resource, if this can be an external no longer here, but she's a person. She was a real person. I think about what if I'm having a conversation with her, and she would never really be impulsive with me. She would just pause and just think, well, and I know she's going to drop some wisdom, right?So that's one of my sources. My grandmother, both of them to a degree, but my mom's mom for sure is I would say her feet. So I'd have these conversations. I still don't want to embarrass them. I don't want to make them look bad. I want them to be proud of me toDay. So that helps me make decisions. It helps me a lot of times on how I respond in the same way we believe that God is ever present and omniscient and knowing what we're doing and what we're thinking and feeling and watching, not watching in a surveillance type of way, but watching over us like a parent. If we believe that in those moments, I pretend because I don't know, but I pretend that my grandmother is, she's in heaven and she's watching over all right now, and I'm not offering a theological position that when they die and go to heaven, they're still present with us omnipresent. Now, I'm not saying any of that, just in my mind. I tell myself, grandma could be watching me. What will grandma do? Type of thing. So that becomes an external resource for me as well as mentors that I've had in my life. Even if I can't get in touch with them, I would recall conversations we've had, and they're still alive. I recall conversations we've had and how would they guide me in this? And so I remember their words. I remember more than I even realized.Danielle (17:59):And that feels so lovely and so profound that those roots, those, I want to say ancestors, but family, family connections, that they're resourcing us before they even know they're resourcing us.So they're not unfamiliar with suffering and pain and love and joy. So they may not know exactly what we're going through in this moment, 2025, but they do know what it is to suffer. They do know what it is to walk through life. It's heavy sometimes.Phil Allen Jr. (18:43):Yes, yes, yes. They prepared me and my siblings well, and my mom is the encourager. My mom is the person that just says it's going to be okay. It's going to work out. And sometimes I don't want to hear that, but my grandparents would say a little bit more, they were more sagacious in their words, and they would share that wisdom from their life, 80 plus years. And even with my mom, sometimes I'll look back and be like, she was right. I knew she was right. I knew she was right because she'd been through so much and it is going to be okay. It's going to be okay. It always is. And so I don't take that lightly either.Danielle (19:40):When you come to this current moment with your ancestors, your faith, those kinds of things with you, how then do you form a picture of where we are at, maybe as a faith, and I'm speaking specifically to the United States, and you might speak more specifically to your own cultural context. I know for Latino, for Latinx folks, there was some belief that was fairly strong, especially among immigrant men. I would say that to vote for particular party could mean hope and access to power. And so now there's a backtrack of grappling with this has actually meant pain and hate and dissolve of my family. And so what did that mean for my faith? So I think we're having a different experience, but I'm wondering from your experience, how then are you forming a picture of today?Phil Allen Jr. (20:47):I knew where we were headed. Nothing surprises me because my faith teaches me to look at core underlying causes, root causes in an individual. When we talk about character, what are the patterns of this person that's going to tell us a lot about who this person is, they're in leadership, where they're going to lead us, what are the patterns of a particular group, the patterns that a lot of people don't pay attention to or are unaware of? What are those patterns? And even then, you may have to take a genealogical approach, historical approach, and track those patterns going back generations and coming to the current time to tell us where we'reAnd then do the same thing broadly with the United States. And if you pay attention to patterns, I'm a patterns person. If you pay attention to patterns, it'll tell you where you're going. It'll tell you where you're headed. So my faith has taught me to pay attention to even the scripture that says from the heart, the mouth speaks. So if I want to know a person, I just pay attention to what they're saying. I'm just going to listen. And if I listen intently, carefully, what they've said over time tells me how they will lead us, tells me how they will respond. It tells me everything about their ethics, their morality. It tells me what I need to know. If I pay attention, nothing surprises me where we are, the term MAGA is not just a campaign slogan, it's a vision statement. Make America great again. Each of these words, carry weight again, tells me, and it's not even a vision statement, it's nostalgic. It's not creative. It's not taking us into a new future with a new, something new and fresh. It is looking backwards. Again, let's take what we did. It might look a little differently. Let's take what we did and we're going to bring that to 2025. Great. What is great? That's a relative statement. That's a relative word.(23:36):I always ask people, give me one decade. In the last 400 plus years since Europeans encountered, 500 years since Europeans encountered indigenous people, give me one decade of greatness, moral greatness. Not just economic or militarily, but moral greatness where the society was just equitable, fair and loving. I can't find one.Because the first 127 years with interaction with indigenous people was massacre violence, conquest of land, beginning with a narrative that said that they were savages. Then you got 246 years of slavery,Years of reconstruction. And from 1877 to 19 68, 91 years of Jim Crow. So you can't start until you get to 1970.And then you got mass incarceration, the prison industrial complex and racial profiling. So for black folks, especially seventies, and you had the crack of it, the war on drugs was really a war on the communities because it wasn't the same response of the opioid addiction just a few years ago in the suburbs, in the white suburbs, it was a war, whereas this was called a health crisis. So people were in prison, it was violence industry. So now we're in 1990s, and we still can start talking about police brutality, excessive force. And since 1989, you, it's been revealed 50 plus percent of exonerations are African-Americans. So that means throughout the seventies, eighties, and nineties, people who have been put in prison, who unjustly. And that affects an entire community that affects families. And you got school shootings starting with Columbine and mass shootings. So tell me one decade of America greatness.So if I pay attention to the patterns, I should not be surprised with where we are. Make America great. Again, that's a vision statement, but it's nostalgic. It's not innovative. It's taking us back to a time when it was great for people, certain people, and also it was telegraphed. These ice raids were telegraphed.2015, the campaign started with they're sending their rapists and their murder. So the narrative began to create a threat out of brown bodies. From the beginning, he told us,Yeah, right. So project 2025, if you actually paid attention to it, said exactly what they were wanting to do. Nothing surprises me. Go back to the response to Obama as president first, black president, white supremacist group, hate groups rose and still cause more violence than any other group in the country. But they have an ally in the office. So nothing surprises me. My faith tells me, pay attention to the underlying, pay attention to the root causes. Pay attention to the patterns of what people ignore and what they don't pay attention to. And it'll tell you where you're headed. So nothing surprises me,Danielle (27:39):Phil, you'll know this better than me, but Matthew five, that's the beatitudes, right? And I think that's where Jesus hits on this, right? He's like, you said this and I'm saying this. He's saying, pay attention to what's underneath the surface. Don't just say you love someone. What will you do for them? What will you do for your enemy? What will you do for your neighbor? And the reward is opposite. So a lot of times I've been talking with friends and I'm like, it's almost, I love Marvel movies. And you know how they time travel to try to get all the reality stones back and endgame? IA lot of movies. Okay, well, they time travel.Following you. Yeah. They time travel. And I feel like we're in an alternate time, like an alternate, alternate time zone where Jesus is back, he's facing temptations with Satan. And instead of saying no, he's like, bring it on. Give me the world. And we're living in an alternate space where faith, where we're seeing a faith played out with the name of Jesus, but the Jesus being worshiped is this person that would've said yes to the devil that would've said, yes, give me all the kingdoms of the world. Let rule everything. Yes, I'm going to jump. I know you're going to catch me. I can be reckless with my power and my resources. That's what I feel like all the bread I want. Of course I'm hungry. I'm going to take it all for myself. I feel like we're living in that era. It just feels like there's this timeline where this is the Jesus that's being worshiped. Jesus.That's how I feel. And so it's hard for me, and it's good for me to hear you talk about body. It's hard for me to then mix that reality. Because when I talk to someone, I'm like, man, I love Jesus. I love the faith you're talking about. And when I'm out there, I feel such bristle, such bristle and such angst in my body, anxiety like fear when I hear the name of Jesus, that Jesus, does that make sense?Phil Allen Jr. (30:05):Yes. Yeah. And that's so good. And I would you make me think about white Jesus?Like the aesthetics of Jesus. And that was intentional. And so my question for you real quick, how do you feel? What do you sense happening in your body when you see a brown Jesus, when you see an unattractive Palestinian, maybe even Moroccan Ethiopian looking, Jesus, brown skin, darker skin, any shade of brown to depict what Jesus, let's say, someone trying to depict what Jesus might've looked like. I've seen some images that said Jesus would've looked like this. And I don't know if that's true or not, but he was brown. Very different than the European. Jesus with blue eyes, brought blonde hair. What do you sense in, have you ever seen a picture, an image like that? And what do you remember about your response, your bodily response to that?Danielle (31:14):Well, it makes me feel like crying, just to hear you talk about it. I feel relief. I think I feel like I could settle. I would be calm. Some sort of deep resonance. It's interesting you say, I lived in Morocco for two years with my husband, and he's Mexican. Mexican, born there Mexican. And everybody thought he was Moroccan or Egyptian or they were like, who are you? And then they would find out he was Mexican. And they're like, oh man, we're brothers. That's literally an Arabic. They was like, we're brothers. We're brothers. Like, oh yeah, that's the feeling I have. We would be welcomed in.Phil Allen Jr. (32:00):Wow. I asked that question because whenever I've taught, I used teach in my discipleship group a class before they were put into small mentoring groups. I'd have a six, seven week class that I taught on just foundational doctrine and stuff like that. And when I talked about the doctrine of get into Christology, I would present a black Jesus or a brown Jesus, Palestinian Jesus. And you could feel the tension in the room. And usually somebody would push back speaking on behalf of most of the people in the room would push back. And I would just engage in conversation.(32:52):And usually after I would speak to them about and get them to understand some things, then they would start to settle. When I would get them to think about when was the white Jesus, when was Jesus presented as white and by whom and why? And why would Jesus look this way? Everybody else in that era, that time and that spade, that region would've looked very differently. Why do you think this is okay? And then someone would inevitably say, well, his race doesn't matter. And I heard a professor of mine say it mattered enough to change it. Absolutely. Why not be historically accurate? And that was when the light switch came on for many of them. But initially they were disoriented. They were not settled in their bodies. And that to me tells a lot about that's that alternative. Jesus, the one who would've jumped, the one who would've saved himself, the one who would've fallen into the temptation. I would say that that's the white Jesus, that what we call Christian, lowercase c Christian nationalism or even American conservative evangelicalism, which has also been rooted in white supremacy historically. That's the Jesus that's being worshiped. I've said all along, we worship different gods.(34:30):We perceive Jesus very differently. That's why the debates with people who are far left, right or conservative, the debates are pointless because we worship different gods. We're not talking about the same Jesus. So I think your illustration is dead on. I'm seeing a movie already in my head.Danielle (34:58):I have tried to think, how can I have a picture of our world having been raised by one part of my family that's extremely conservative. And then the other part not how do I find a picture of what's happening, maybe even inside of me, like the invitation to the alternate reality, which we're talking about to what's comfortable, to what's the common narrative and also the reality of like, oh, wait, that's not how it worked for all of my family. It was struggle. It was like, what? So I think, but I do think that our faith, like you said, invites us to wrestle with that. Jesus asks questions all the time.Phil Allen Jr. (35:46):Yes, I am learning more and more to be comfortable setting a table rather than trying to figure out whose table I go to, whether it's in the family, friends, whomever. I'm comfortable setting a table that I believe is invitational, a table of grace as well as standards. I mean, I don't believe in just anything goes either. I'm not swinging a pendulum all the way to the other side, but I do believe it's a table of grace and truly, truly, rather than trying to make people believe and live out that faith the way I think they should, inviting them to a space where hopefully they can meet with God and let God do that work, whatever it is that they need to do. But I'm comfortable creating a table and saying, Hey, I'm going to be at this table that's toxic. That table over there is toxic. That table over there is unhealthy. I'm going to be at this table.Danielle (37:05):How practically do you see that working out? What does that look like in your everyday life or maybe in the discipleship settings you're in? How does that look?Phil Allen Jr. (37:16):I'm very careful in the company I keep. I'm very careful in who I give my time to. You might get me one time, you're not going to get me twice if there's toxicity and ignorance. And so for example, I'm in the coffee shop all the time. I rotate, but I have my favorites and I meet people all the time who want to have coffee. And I'm able to just yesterday three hours with someone and I'm able to put my pastoral hat on and just sit and be present with people. That's me creating a table. Had that conversation gone differently, I would say it certainly would not have lasted three hours. And I'm not making space and giving energy to them anymore because I know what they're bringing to do is toxic for me. It's unhealthy for me. Now, if we turned around and we had some conversations and can get on the same page, again, I'm not saying you have to agree with me on everything, but I'm also talking about tone. I'm talking about the energy, the spirit that person carries. I'm talking about their end goal. That's me giving an example. That's an example of me setting a table. The sacred spaces that I create, I'm willing to invite you in. And if we can maintain that peace and that joy, and it can be life-giving, and again, we don't even have to agree and we don't have to be in the same faith.(39:03):I have conversations all the time, people of other faiths or non-faith, and it's been life-giving for me, incredibly life-giving for me, for both of us I think. But I won't do that for, I've also had a couple of times when the person was far right, or in my dms on social media, someone appears to want to have a civil conversation, but really it was a bait. It was debate me into debate. And then next thing you know, insults and I block. And so I block because I'm not giving you space my space anymore. I'm not giving you access to do that to me anymore. So for me, it's creating a table is all the spaces I occupy that are mine, social media spaces, platform, a coffee shop. Where am I attend church,Right now I don't. And my church is in that coffee shop When I have those, when Jesus says with two or more gathered, there I am in the midst. I take that very seriously.When we gather, when me and someone or three of us are sitting and talking, and I'm trusting that God is present, God is in the space between us and it is been life-giving for us. So all that to say, wherever my body is, wherever I'm present, the table is present, the metaphorical table is there, and I'm careful about who I invite into that space because it's sacred for me. My health is at stake,Time and energy is at stake. And so that's how I've been living my life in the last five years or so is again, I don't even accept every invitation to preach anymore because I have to ask myself, I have have to check in my body.Right? No, I don't think this is what I'm supposed to do. And then there's sometimes I'm like, yeah, I want to preach there. I like that space. I trust them. And so that's me sharing a table. I'm going to their location, but I also bring in my table and I'm asking them to join me at the table.Danielle (41:46):I love that you check in with your body. I was even just about to ask you that. What do you notice in your body when you're setting up that table? Phil? What would you recommend? Someone's listening, they're like, these guys are crazy. I've never checked in my body once in my life. Can you share how you started doing that or what it was just at the beginning?Phil Allen Jr. (42:13):So community resiliency model, the first thing we teach is tracking,Noticing and paying attention to the sensations that's going on in your body,They're pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. And for me, one of the things I noticed long before I ever got connected to this was when something didn't feel right for me, I could sometimes feel a knot in my stomach. My heart rate would start increasing, and that's not always bad. So I had to wait. I had to learn to wait and see what that meant. Sometimes it just means nervousness, excitement, but I know God is calling me to it. So I had to wait to make sure it was that. Or was it like, I'm not supposed to do this thing.So we use this term called body literacy, learning to read, paying attention to what's happening in the body. And that could mean sometimes palms get sweaty, your body temperature rises and muscles get tight. Maybe there's some twitching, right? All these little things that we just ignore, our bodies are telling us something. And I don't disconnect that from the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit knowing how to reach us, how to speak, not just a word of revelation, but in our bodies. And once I learned that, I trusted that God was in that. So I learned years ago when I was supposed to say something publicly, if I'm in a public space, I knew when I was supposed to say something. It took me a couple of years and I figured it out. And this is before ever learning, tracking and all this stuff.My heart would start racing and it would not stop. And it'd be the sense of urgency, that thing that thought you have, you have to say it now.I'm an introvert. I speak for a living. I present, but I don't like to say anything unless I have to. And I learned I could sit through something and be calm and comfortable and not have to say a word. But then I also learned that there were times when I'm supposed to say something here and I started listening to that. So paying attention to those sensations, those things that we ignore, that's happening in our bodies because our nervous system is activated for some reason.Danielle (44:57):I love to hear you say it. And also it's one of the things I think we naturally want to turn off when we're in a high trauma environment or come from a high trauma background. Or maybe you don't know what to do with the sensations, right?Can you just say a couple things about what moved you over that hump? How did you step into that despite maybe even any kind of, I don't know, reservations or just difficultiesTracking your body?Phil Allen Jr. (45:33):Getting language for what I was already doing, because with crim, one of the things that was revelatory for me was I was like, wait a minute. I already do a lot of these things. So for instance, touch and feel can settle out. Nervous systems, surfaces, you can put your hand, I have my hand on my armrest. It's smooth. If I'm nervous about something, I can literally just rub this smooth surface. It feels really good, and it can settle my nervous system, right? A sip of water, a drink of water can settle your nervous system. These are not just imaginations. This is literally how the body responds. You know this. So when they gave me language for things I had already been doing, so for instance, resourcing. And you had asked me earlier, and I mentioned my grandmother, if you paid attention to my face, I probably had a smile on my face talking about her.Because that resource, it brings up sensations in my body that are pleasant.My heart rate slows down. I could feel the warmth in my cheeks from smiling. So that's something that I tap into. And that's one of the ways that you can understand tracking when you think about a person, place, or thing that is pleasant, and then pay attention to what's going on in your body. And it might be neutral because it takes a while to be able to learn how to identify these things. And when I started doing that and I realized, wait a minute, my body, I feel settled. I feel at peace when I do this or do that. And that's when I said, okay, there's science behind this. And so that's when five years ago is when I started really like, I'm going to continue to do this and share this and practice this. I use it in my nonprofit racial solidarity project because this is how we stay engaged in the conversation about race. We get triggered, we get activated. A nervous system says threat. This person is threat, or this idea is a threat, especially when it disorients what we've been taught all our lives. And we get defensive, we get impulsive, and we argue and then we out.(48:18):So I use this as part of mentoring people to stay engaged by giving them the skills to regulate their nervous system when they're in those conversations, or if they're watching the news and they don't like what they see, they want to turn the news or they want to just shut it off. Some people hear the word critical race theory and it's already triggering for them,Absolutely. And what do you do? You check out, you disengage. You get defensive. Well, that's not necessarily how they feel. It's what they're sensing in their body. Their nervous system is triggered. So if they had the skills to settle that regulate their nervous system, they could probably stay engaged enough to listen to what's actually being said. It might actually come to, oh, I didn't realize that.Danielle (49:18):It's so good to hear you talk about it though. It's so encouraging. It's like, oh man. Being in our bodies, I think is one way. We know our faith more, and I actually think it's one way we can start to step in and cross and understand one another. But I think if we're not in our bodies, I think if we maintain some sort of rigidity or separation that it's going to be even harder for us to come together.Phil Allen Jr. (49:51):I'm crazy a little bit, but I ran running, taught me how to breathe. No other practice in my faith taught me how to breathe. And I don't mean in a meditative kind of way, religious kind of way. I mean just literally breathing properly.That's healthy.Danielle (50:13):It is healthy. Breathing is great. Yeah.Phil Allen Jr. (50:16):I want to be actually alive. But running forces you to have to pay attention to your body breathing. What type of pain is this in my knee? Is this the type of pain that says stop running? Or is this the type of pain that says this is minor and it's probably going to go away within the next half a mile?Right. Which then teaches us lessons in life. This pain, this emotional pain that I'm feeling, does it say, stop doing the thing that I'm doing, or is this something I have to go through because God is trying to reveal something to me?Running has taught me that. That's why running is a spiritual discipline for me. The spiritual discipline I didn't know I needed.Danielle (51:07):Yep. You're going to have to, yeah, keep going. Keep going.Phil Allen Jr. (51:10):Sorry. I was going to say, it taught me how to pay attention to my body, from my feet to my breathing. It taught me to pay attention to my body. When I dealt with AFib last year is because I pay attention to my body. When my heart wasn't beating the right way, it was like something ain't right. So I didn't try to push through it like I would have 10, 15, 20 years ago, paying attention to my body, said, stop. Go to urgent care. Next thing you know, I'm in an emergency room. I didn't know that with all this stuff attached to me. Next thing you know, I got these diagnoses. Next thing you know, I'm on medication. And fortunately the medication has everything stabilized. I still have some episodes of arrhythmia. I don't know if it's ever going to go away. Hopefully I can get off of these medications. I feel great. Matter of fact, I didn't take my medication this morning. I got to take 'em when we get done, brother. So all that to say, man, paying attention to what's happening in my body has helped me to deal with this current reality. It's helped me to stay grounded, helped me to make wise decisions. I trust that God, that though what I'm reading in my body, that the spirit of God is in that,(52:46):Is knowing how to speak to me, knowing what I'm going to pay attention to, what I'm going to respond to. Oh, that's how you read that. You're going to respond to that. Okay. That I'm going to urge you and prompt you through these bodily sensations, if you will.Danielle (53:10):Yeah. I don't really have a lot to say to answer that. It's just really beautiful and gorgeous. And also, please take your medicine. How can people reach you? How can they find out more about your work? How can they read what you're writing and what you're thinking? Where can they find you?Phil Allen Jr. (53:33):So on social media, everything is Phil Allen Jr. So whether that's Instagram. Instagram is actually Phil Allen Jr. PhD.It. LinkedIn and Facebook. Phil Allen Jr. On Facebook, there's a regular page and there's an author page. I don't really use the author page. I'm trying to figure out how to delete that. But the regular page, Phil Allen, Jr. Threads, Phil Allen Jr. I don't do X, but LinkedIn, Phil Allen Jr. My book Open Wounds. You can either go to your local bookstore, I want to support local bookstores. You can ask them if they have it, open Wounds, the Story of Racial Trauma, racial Tragedy, trauma and Redemption. And my other book, the Prophetic Lens, the Camera and Black Moral Agency from MLK to Darnella Frazier. You can find those books on Amazon, or you can go to your local bookstore and ask them to order it for you because it supports your local bookstore. Or you can go directly to fortress press.com and order it. It goes directly. You're supporting the publisher that publish my books, which helps, which actually helps me most. But those are three ways you can get those books. And then hopefully in the next year or so, I have three book projects. I'm kind of in different stages of right now that I'm working on, and hopefully one comes out in the next year.Yeah. Year and a half. We'll see.Danielle (55:21):That's exciting. Well, Phil, thank you so much. I'm going to stop recording. As always, thank you for joining us and at the end of the podcast, our notes and resources, and I encourage you to stay connected to those who are loving in your path and in your community. Stay tuned.Kitsap County & Washington State Crisis and Mental Health ResourcesIf you or someone else is in immediate danger, please call 911.This resource list provides crisis and mental health contacts for Kitsap County and across Washington State.Kitsap County / Local ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They OfferSalish Regional Crisis Line / Kitsap Mental Health 24/7 Crisis Call LinePhone: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/24/7 emotional support for suicide or mental health crises; mobile crisis outreach; connection to services.KMHS Youth Mobile Crisis Outreach TeamEmergencies via Salish Crisis Line: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://sync.salishbehavioralhealth.org/youth-mobile-crisis-outreach-team/Crisis outreach for minors and youth experiencing behavioral health emergencies.Kitsap Mental Health Services (KMHS)Main: 360‑373‑5031; Toll‑free: 888‑816‑0488; TDD: 360‑478‑2715Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/Outpatient, inpatient, crisis triage, substance use treatment, stabilization, behavioral health services.Kitsap County Suicide Prevention / “Need Help Now”Call the Salish Regional Crisis Line at 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/Suicide-Prevention-Website.aspx24/7/365 emotional support; connects people to resources; suicide prevention assistance.Crisis Clinic of the PeninsulasPhone: 360‑479‑3033 or 1‑800‑843‑4793Website: https://www.bainbridgewa.gov/607/Mental-Health-ResourcesLocal crisis intervention services, referrals, and emotional support.NAMI Kitsap CountyWebsite: https://namikitsap.org/Peer support groups, education, and resources for individuals and families affected by mental illness.Statewide & National Crisis ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They Offer988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (WA‑988)Call or text 988; Website: https://wa988.org/Free, 24/7 support for suicidal thoughts, emotional distress, relationship problems, and substance concerns.Washington Recovery Help Line1‑866‑789‑1511Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesHelp for mental health, substance use, and problem gambling; 24/7 statewide support.WA Warm Line877‑500‑9276Website: https://www.crisisconnections.org/wa-warm-line/Peer-support line for emotional or mental health distress; support outside of crisis moments.Native & Strong Crisis LifelineDial 988 then press 4Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesCulturally relevant crisis counseling by Indigenous counselors.Additional Helpful Tools & Tips• Behavioral Health Services Access: Request assessments and access to outpatient, residential, or inpatient care through the Salish Behavioral Health Organization. Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/SBHO-Get-Behaviroal-Health-Services.aspx• Deaf / Hard of Hearing: Use your preferred relay service (for example dial 711 then the appropriate number) to access crisis services.• Warning Signs & Risk Factors: If someone is talking about harming themselves, giving away possessions, expressing hopelessness, or showing extreme behavior changes, contact crisis resources immediately.Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that. Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Rebecca A. Wheeler Walston, J.D., Master of Arts in CounselingEmail: asolidfoundationcoaching@gmail.comPhone:  +1.5104686137Website: Rebuildingmyfoundation.comI have been doing story work for nearly a decade. I earned a Master of Arts in Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary and trained in story work at The Allender Center at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. I have served as a story facilitator and trainer at both The Allender Center and the Art of Living Counseling Center. I currently see clients for one-on-one story coaching and work as a speaker and facilitator with Hope & Anchor, an initiative of The Impact Movement, Inc., bringing the power of story work to college students.By all accounts, I should not be the person that I am today. I should not have survived the difficulties and the struggles that I have faced. At best, I should be beaten down by life‘s struggles, perhaps bitter. I should have given in and given up long ago. But I was invited to do the good work of (re)building a solid foundation. More than once in my life, I have witnessed God send someone my way at just the right moment to help me understand my own story, and to find the strength to step away from the seemingly inevitable ending of living life in defeat. More than once I have been invited and challenged to find the resilience that lies within me to overcome the difficult moment. To trust in the goodness and the power of a kind gesture. What follows is a snapshot of a pivotal invitation to trust the kindness of another in my own story. May it invite you to receive to the pivotal invitation of kindness in your own story. Listen with me… Rebecca (01:12):Say, oh, this is for black women, and then what? Because I quoted a couple of black people that count. I don't want to do that. And also I'm still trying to process. When you run a group like that for, and it's not embedded in something like a story workshop or a larger kind of thing, the balance of how do you give people the information and still leave room to process all of that. I'm still trying to figure out what does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it sound like? And I won't be able to figure, it's not like I can figure it out before the group and you know what I mean? You just have to roll with it. So yeah,Danielle (02:01):All those things. That's so hard, man. Man, dude, that's so hard. It's so hard to categorize it. Even What's the right time of day to hold this? What are the right words to say to tell people, this is how you can show up. And even when you say all those things and you think you've created some clarity or safety or space, they still show up in their own way, of course. And they may not have read your email. They may have signed all this stuff and it may not be what they want. Or maybe it changes and it becomes something even more beautiful. I don't know. That's how I've experienced it.Rebecca (02:39):It's all those things, and I think, and this is what I want to do, this is taking this work into a community and a space that is never going to show up in Seattle for all a thousand reasons. And soDanielle (02:56):Thousands of dollar reasons,Rebecca (02:58):Right? Thousands of dollar reasons. And so this is what I want to do. And so the million dollar question, how do you actually do that with some integrity? How do you do it in a way that actually, I don't even know if I could say I know that I want it to produce a particular result is just when I started doing this on my own, I had a lot of people reach out to me and go like, this is amazing. This is a brilliant, this is something I've been looking for without knowing that's what I've been looking for. Do you know what I mean? I think that that's true, sort of that evangelical refugee space. That's true right now. I think it's appealing on those levels. I think for people who would not necessarily go to therapy for the hundred of reasons why that's an uncomfortable thing. Culturally, this feels like it has a little more oxygen in the room,Danielle  (04:20):And I'll turn my screen off. I'll make the call and then yeah, then I want to hear a little bit about your business, more about your group, and I, I'd love to just, I want to focus this whole season on what is reality in the realm of faith, culture, life therapy, religion, if you're in a religion versus a faith. Yeah. Just those what is our reality? Because I think even as you talk about group, it's like what is the reality for that group of people for accessing care? So that's the overall season theme.Speaker 2 (05:00):Okay.Speaker 1 (05:02):How does that sound for you?Speaker 2 (05:03):That sounds great.Speaker 1 (05:04):Yeah. I know you have a lot of thoughts,Speaker 2 (05:07):But we do good bouncing off each other's thoughts. Me and you were good.Speaker 1 (05:13):So tell me how you started your own business.Speaker 2 (05:16):That's a good question. There's probably a long answer and a short answer. The long one is that I went and got a master's in marriage and family from a seminary 20 plus years ago, and by the time I finished my degree, I chose to go back to being a full-time attorney. And there's a story there, as there always is, that has to do with me almost being kicked out of theSpeaker 3 (05:55):ProgramSpeaker 2 (05:56):Because someone lodged a complaint against me as a person. The stated reason behind the claim was that my disability was a distraction to clients,(06:09):And I was absolutely undone and totally shredded, all just completely undone by the entire ordeal experience, all of it. It just really undid me in a way that I don't know if I could have put the pieces together then, but I think that played a huge part in me going, I'm going to go back to my original career, which was being an attorney, and I will put this down and I don't know. And so it's 20 plus years later, I still have that whatever was the inclination inside of me that made me say, this work is the kind of work I want to do is still there. And so I think this time around I felt empowered, I felt supported. I felt like I had people and community around me, people like you and lots of people that was like, I can actually do this, and I don't necessarily need the permission of an institution or the rubber stamp of another person to actually take what I have learned about living life and offer it to someone else. So I find myself now the owner and practitioner of solid foundation story Coaching, and we're going to see where the Lord leads and we're going to see where we end up.Speaker 1 (07:38):Okay. When in any moment, I might have to hop off here, you said nine 10 to nine 15, but what do you imagine then for your first offerings? I know you jumped in a little bit at the beginning and we kind of touched on it, but what are your first, what's your desire? What are you trying to offer?Speaker 2 (08:00):That's a good confusion too. I think a couple of things. I come from a very conservative evangelical Christian background that is also, there's these parallel roots in my background that are rooted in the black church. And every once in a while I can feel my evangelical why and what and why, and what I think the short answer is just care. You asked me what do you want to offer? And that I think my answer is care for a lot of reasons. When I look at my own story and my own life and my own path, there are lots of ways and places where I can identify. I didn't have the care that I needed. I didn't have the support that I needed to get where I wanted to go, sort of maybe unscathed, maybe in the shortest path possible with the least amount of obstacles as a woman, as a person of color, as a black American woman in the church, in as a person with a disability, all kinds of ways in which there were places in ways that I needed care that I didn't get. And even with all that being said, once, twice, maybe three times the exact right care at the exact right moment from the person who was capable and willing to give it, and it only takes one person at just the right time to offer just a few minutes of care and what is impossible becomes possible,(10:01):And what is too painful to breathe through becomes something that you can now face head on. So I think in some way, maybe it's paying forward what those people who offered me care gave to me, and now it's my chance to give it back.Rebecca (10:37):Right? Yeah. I mean, if I were going to go for the obvious, the things that we are most comfortable talking about at this moment in our country's history, to women who have faced misogyny in its most simplistic and its most complex and twisted ways to black folks and all that we have faced and struggled through to people of color. There are all kinds of ways in which out of my own story, there are corners that I recognize. And what do I mean by that, right? I have lived my life as an African-American woman, and so there are corners in life that I have come to recognize. That moment when you recognize that somehow this moment, which should be simple and just human has become racialized, and you catch it by a glance, a look, a silence that lasts too long, and you go like, oh, I know exactly where I am.(11:53):I may not know the person in front of me, but I know people like them, and this experience begins to feel familiar, and I know what this corner looks like, and I know what it sounds like, and I know where the dip in the sidewalk is, and I know where there's this pothole that if you step in it the wrong way, you're going to twist your ankle. I know exactly how long you have to cross the street before that flashing red hand comes up. The ways in which, because you've been here before because you've struggled in a familiar moment, you know what it looks like and sounds like and feels like,(12:33):And because it is familiar, then perhaps you can offer something of wisdom or kindness to someone who's new to that corner who doesn't quite know how to navigate it. So I can say that about being black, about being a woman. There are all kinds of things in my own story that have made these corners familiar to me. So yes to all of those things, all of those kinds of people, that there's something I have in common with the parallels of their story that I can say, Hey, I know this corner and I have a flashlight and I can shine my light in front of your path so you can take another step.Danielle (13:17):How do you feel in your body as you say that?Rebecca (13:22):I feel good. It feels like me. You say, how do you feel in your body? Why would you ask that question? What do we mean by that? Which is part of this work, which is being able to recognize when I'm comfortable in my own skin and when I'm not, and being able to recognize why that might be true in any given moment. And so this part feels good to me. It feels like steps I was trying to take 20 years ago that got hijacked and sidetracked by what happened to me in grad school. And it feels like work that I was meant to do because of the corners that I know. So I feel good. I can breathe deep.Danielle (14:12):How do you know when you feel good? What tells you you're feeling goodRebecca (14:16):For me? That I can take a full deep breath. I have come to recognize that shallow breathing means I am not comfortable, so I can take a deep breath and it doesn't feel restricted to me that that's probably, for me, the most notable thing is to say that. And because I am not doing a lot of self editing, I feel okay saying what I have say. I don't have a lot of self-talk of like, Ooh, don't say that or don't say that. Yeah,Danielle (14:57):Which feels like something you can give your participants. I think I mentioned to you, I really wanted to hear about what you're up to business, but it really feels to me like a special kind of work in this season. And I know I mentioned, I was like, well, what's the reality of this season? Could you speak about the intersection of your work and what you see as the reality of our current climate?Rebecca (15:29):So when you first said that to me, my first reaction is go like, oh, I know what my reality is as a black woman, as a mother of two kids, as somebody that lives a mile from where the first enslaved Africans set foot on us soil. I have a very clear sense of my reality, but I'm also going like, and I'm sitting across from you, Danielle, who I know in this moment is living a very different reality as a Latino woman. And so the one thing, or sort of the second thought that comes to my mind after my first reaction, I know what my reality is, is something that I learned recently. I did a webinar and I moderated a panel, and one of the individuals on the panel is a Latino pastor. I'll call him Pastor Carlos. And one of the things that he said to me is that if my truth in any given moment is crafted at the expense of another human, my truth cannot be the absolute truth.Yeah. Now I'm paraphrasing a little bit. So Pastor Carlos, if you hear this, and please forgive me for the paraphrase, but what settled in me from his remarks is that if my truth in any given moment comes at the expense of another person, my truth cannot stand as the absolute truth. And he went on to say something of truth must always be defined in the context of community that we cannot discern what is reality, if you will, in a given moment without having that discussion and framing those contours in the context of community and connectedness to other people. So I could tell you my truth as a black American woman in 2025, and I already know, I know my sense of what is true in my world is going to look and sound and feel different than what is true for you in this moment. Right?Danielle (18:03):Talking about reality, I feel that even despite our different truths, you and I find ourselves touching ground like physical ground, touching energy, spirituality in the same way, not thinking the same. I don't mean that, but living in a space where you and I can connect and affirm one another's actual experiences in the world, actual day to day. I can tell you about a neighbor, you could tell me about work or one of your kids, and there's a sense that you haven't lived that exact, you're not with me in my house, I'm not with your kid in their school, but there's a sense that we can touch into a reality. We're in the ground somewhere together. So I'm wondering, what do you think makes that possible for us to share that space?Rebecca (18:57):I mean, it might be I part the willingness to share, and I don't mean, well, maybe I mean that in both senses of the word, the willingness to be shared in terms of vulnerable, I'm willing to tell you. And so when you ask me, Hey, how are you? When I say, Hey, Danielle, what's up with you? It's more than just the flippant, oh, I'm good. I'm cool. Right? It is this intentional move to slow down for 60 seconds or 60 minutes and go like, here's really happening with me.(19:38):And the other sort of piece of that, when I say the word share, I mean the willingness for there to be a little wiggle room in what I understand to be true. And that's not to say that I will take your truth and replace it with mine and obliterate my experience, not suggesting that I'm saying that my truth and your truth are going to butt up against each other and in the place where they touch, what do we do with that friction? Does that friction become a point of contention, a point of disagreement, a point of anger, of judgment where I villainize you and demonize you and other you? Or does that place where my truth and your truth rub up against each other? Does that become a place of learning? Does that become a place of flexibility of saying like, huh, I never thought about it the way you thought about it. Say more. And my experience between you and I is that there has been a willingness for years to go. What do you know about the world that I don't know? What do you see that I don't see? And how does your perspective actually alter if even just a little bit what I believe or know to be true of the world?Danielle (21:04):Yes, I agree with you. I think we find ourselves in a time though where the sharing of our reality feels unique, where groups, even groups, we would call them bipoc or black, indigenous people of color. You even see skirmishes between groups. And so I think it's laid in one with so much fear. Number two, with so much hypervigilance. And again, I'm not saying none of those things aren't warranted, but I think a group like yours or therapy or somatic work hopefully opens us up to be able to see the humanity of another person.That make sense or what do you thinking when I sayRebecca (21:49):No, it does. When you were talking about in this moment, it feels unique for groups to kind of share their experience. It caused me to kind of think about why is that right? And I don't think that's an accident. I don't think it is a coincidence. I think that there are powers that are crafting these sort of larger narratives that suggest that we have to be at odds with each other, that there isn't a way for us to see each other and recognize one another's humanity without there being this catastrophic threat to my own humanity. And I think part of why it feels so unique in this moment is because I think we're having to do some pretty significant work to fight against that larger narrative that would suggest that we can't be friends, that we must be enemies.Danielle(22:49):Yeah. What do you feel as you say that? I mean, when you say that I feel like I want to cry, I want to be angry, I want to be choked up, and those are all familiar for me. They're familiar for me.Rebecca (23:08):Well, mostly I feel a kind of loss. And what do I mean by that? I saw this clip on Instagram recently where it's a family. They're probably white, Caucasian American family sitting down to dinner at a table, the table's full of food,(23:33):And there's a bowl of strawberries on the table, which in my house during this time of year, there's forever. There's always strawberries in my house anyway. And so somebody says the blessing over the food, dear God, thank you for the food and the hands that prepared it, this sort of common blessing that is also an everyday occurrence at my house. Literally the words, God bless the food and the hands that prepared it. And then it cuts, the video cuts from the scene of this family, it tucked away safely in their kitchen to a migrant worker in a strawberry field who is being pursued by ice agents. And he says, you're welcome very much for the strawberries. And then the video ends that makes me want to cry, and it makes me think of you. And because that's not a thought I ever thought about when my kids pray, thank you for the hands that prepared it. The thought that went through my mind is like they're praying for me as the mom who cooked the food, who washed the strawberries and sliced them and put them in a bowl and set them on the table, never occurred to me until I saw that video I about the person who picked the strawberries and placed them in the container that found its way to my grocery store that found its way to my kitchen table.(25:08):And so now I wonder, what else do I not know? What else have I missed my entire life? What else did I not catch? And what does that mean for this moment in history when there are literally ice checkpoints in the city where I live?Danielle (25:39):I think to survive this moment and what I hear from my people, we have to take ourselves out of the reality of the moment somehow. You still had to get up and you had to make yourself some scrambled eggs. You have to eat your strawberry, you get to eat your strawberry. We're both at work today, et cetera. And whenever we touch into that other space, we have to let the energy process through us or we won't make it. And I think that process allows us to share a reality, the movement of energy allowing it. It's not like we can live in that state all the time, but I think there's certain segments of the population that don't allow anything in. They can't because otherwise it would contradict their view of faith or what's happened.Rebecca (26:31):Yes. Which I think is why I would do something like offer a group a story group, because it is the opportunity to intentionally take a few minutes to create the space to allow that to process through us.Danielle (26:49):So how do people then, Rebecca, find you? They're enjoying this conversation. I want to hear more from her. I,Rebecca (27:01):So I have a website. It's called Rebuilding my foundation.com. I have Instagram solid foundation Coach is my Instagram site. So two me an email, check out the website, join a group,Danielle (27:26):Join a group. What about people like, Hey, I want to hang out with Danielle and Rebecca. What does that look like? Oh,Rebecca (27:35):Yeah. I mean, we're good for at least once a year doing something together. So it sounds like maybe we need to pull a conversation together, maybe a group together, maybe like a two hour seminar workshop space, which we did last year. We did one with a few other of our friends and colleagues called Defiant Resilience. Again, to create this space where people could process what was happening in this moment in history with people who are safe ish, right? We can't ever really promise safety, but we create some sense of parameters that allow you to take a step or two.Danielle (28:25):Rebecca, what do you say to that person? I get these calls all the time. Well, I can't go to therapy. It's too much money. Or I don't know about group. I don't trust people. If people get stuck, what is one way you even got yourself unstuck to even start?Rebecca  (28:40):Oh, yeah, true. First thing I'd say is if group sounds too risky and not going to lie, you and I both know it's risky.(28:55):You're taking some risk. So if that feels too big of a step, guess what? You get to be where you are. And then I'd say try it one-on-one session. Try it once, see how it feels. It is definitely something that I do. I know it's something you do too, where before you would recommend even that somebody step into a group that you might meet with them 2, 3, 4 times one-on-one once or twice to kind of see, this is what it would feel like to talk to another person about things that we have been taught you're not supposed to talk about. And slowly give a person the opportunity to decide for themselves what good care.You're allowed to say, this doesn't feel like good care to me, so I'm not going to do it today or tomorrow. And how amazing it can be to have somebody go, I love that you advocated for yourself, and I absolutely intend to respect that boundary because for so many of us, we either were taught not to set boundaries or when they were set, we have the common experience of them just being obliterated on a regular basis. So even that opportunity to reach out once, try and decide it's not for you, can actually be a moment of empowerment.Danielle (30:25):Yeah, I guess I think when I'm stuck, it's usually like we call some of those sticky points, like trauma points even. So I wouldn't say it doesn't always have to be major, some huge event, but I think there's often been, for me, there's a fear of getting help, whether it's a medical doctor or a therapist or a group or whatever it may be. Or if I have to call the county for something, I'm like, are they going to listen me? Are they going to believe me in all these kinds of situations and will they care what I have to say?Rebecca (30:58):Yeah. I think too, when you say fear of getting help, I go like, oh yeah, ding, ding. Right? I mean, some of that, at least for me, the narrative that can be around black women is that we have it all together at all times. We got it under control. And so the notion that I wouldn't have it under control all by myself, like 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the notion that I would have to request that someone else step in and assist means admitting something about myself that I don't feel comfortable admitting that I've been taught is not where I'm allowed to live. And so that also I think can be part of this fear. I don't know if that's true for you. Tell me how does that land?Danielle (31:49):Yeah, absolutely true. But it goes across so many realms where sometimes advocating for yourself, whether it's getting a question answered at a shoe store, to buying paint, to getting, I don't know, going to the er, the common themes I had my gallbladder recently removed, and two nurses told me that if I had been a man, I would've been seen faster. Because men, they believe men more about abdominal pain, and I think it's because there's maybe more expression by men of what pain is. And I don't know this for sure. I don't have a scientific research behind it, but part of me wondered, is it because my pain was indicated by my blood pressure, not by me telling them that's how they knew it. So I think that's one reason we have to really pay attention to our bodies, and I think wherever we are, we're not used to being believed, or even if someone knows, if they care, again, whether it's from going to pay a parking ticket, so going to the doctor, I just think across the board, people that are female are generally not as welcome to express how they're feeling and what's going on. Just some thoughts.Rebecca (33:11):Yeah. Again, right. It is that part where there's this larger story at play that impacts how we move individually and what we feel like we're permitted to do or not do, say or not say. You and I have talked about this before, that question of will they believe me is a kind of anticipatory intelligenceYou're trying to anticipate how you will be received, how your words will be believed, how your story will be read in any given context, and who has time, your gallbladder. And so I would imagine you're in this excruciating pain and you're having to not only tend to that, but are you going to believe me? Right? And what if the blood pressure indicator had not been there, right?Danielle (34:07):Yeah. Yeah. All of us are different. Okay. Rebecca, I'm going to put all your info in the notes. People are going to light up your phone. They're going to light up your email, and I do believe we'll be doing something collaborative in the future. Absolutely. Yeah. With other co-conspirators.Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening to the raw conversations we're having, and I just encourage you to get in conversations with your friends, your family, people around you, people you really disagree with, maybe even people you don't like. Try to hold yourself there. Try to have those conversations. Try to be able to receive the difficult comments. Try to be able to say the difficult things. Let's keep working on moving towards one another.   Kitsap County & Washington State Crisis and Mental Health ResourcesIf you or someone else is in immediate danger, please call 911.This resource list provides crisis and mental health contacts for Kitsap County and across Washington State.Kitsap County / Local ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They OfferSalish Regional Crisis Line / Kitsap Mental Health 24/7 Crisis Call LinePhone: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/24/7 emotional support for suicide or mental health crises; mobile crisis outreach; connection to services.KMHS Youth Mobile Crisis Outreach TeamEmergencies via Salish Crisis Line: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://sync.salishbehavioralhealth.org/youth-mobile-crisis-outreach-team/Crisis outreach for minors and youth experiencing behavioral health emergencies.Kitsap Mental Health Services (KMHS)Main: 360‑373‑5031; Toll‑free: 888‑816‑0488; TDD: 360‑478‑2715Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/Outpatient, inpatient, crisis triage, substance use treatment, stabilization, behavioral health services.Kitsap County Suicide Prevention / “Need Help Now”Call the Salish Regional Crisis Line at 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/Suicide-Prevention-Website.aspx24/7/365 emotional support; connects people to resources; suicide prevention assistance.Crisis Clinic of the PeninsulasPhone: 360‑479‑3033 or 1‑800‑843‑4793Website: https://www.bainbridgewa.gov/607/Mental-Health-ResourcesLocal crisis intervention services, referrals, and emotional support.NAMI Kitsap CountyWebsite: https://namikitsap.org/Peer support groups, education, and resources for individuals and families affected by mental illness.Statewide & National Crisis ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They Offer988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (WA‑988)Call or text 988; Website: https://wa988.org/Free, 24/7 support for suicidal thoughts, emotional distress, relationship problems, and substance concerns.Washington Recovery Help Line1‑866‑789‑1511Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesHelp for mental health, substance use, and problem gambling; 24/7 statewide support.WA Warm Line877‑500‑9276Website: https://www.crisisconnections.org/wa-warm-line/Peer-support line for emotional or mental health distress; support outside of crisis moments.Native & Strong Crisis LifelineDial 988 then press 4Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesCulturally relevant crisis counseling by Indigenous counselors.Additional Helpful Tools & Tips• Behavioral Health Services Access: Request assessments and access to outpatient, residential, or inpatient care through the Salish Behavioral Health Organization. Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/SBHO-Get-Behaviroal-Health-Services.aspx• Deaf / Hard of Hearing: Use your preferred relay service (for example dial 711 then the appropriate number) to access crisis services.• Warning Signs & Risk Factors: If someone is talking about harming themselves, giving away possessions, expressing hopelessness, or showing extreme behavior changes, contact crisis resources immediately.Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that. Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Reality and Faith Prompts1. What are the formations or structures for how you know you are in reality in regards to your faith? Do you have indicators? Internal senses? External resources? 2. Who are you in active dialogue with in regards to your faith? Who that is living and who that is passed on? 3. When you encounter dissonance with your reality of faith, how do you stay grounded in your experience?TranscriptsDanielle (00:00):To my computer. So thank you Starlet. Thank you Tamis for being with me. I've given already full introductions. I've recorded those separately. So the theme of the conversation and kind of what we're getting into on this podcast this season is I had this vision for talking about the themes have been race, faith, culture, church in the past on my podcast. But what I really think the question is, where is our reality and where are our touchpoints in those different realms? And so today there's going to be more info on this in the future, but where do we find reality and how do we form our reality when we integrate faith? So one of the questions I was asking Tamis and Starlet was what are the formations or structures for how you know are in reality in regards to your faith? Do you have indicators? Do you have internal senses? Do you have external resources? And so that's where I want to jump off from and it's free flow. I don't do a whole lot of editing, but yeah, just curious where your mind goes when you hear that, what comes to mind and we'll jump from there.Starlette (01:12):I immediately thought of baptism, baptismal waters. My baptismal identity forms and shapes me. It keeps me in touch with my body. It keeps me from being disembodied. Also, it keeps me from being swindled out of authority over my body due to the dangerous irrationalism of white body supremacy. So that's one thing. Protest also keeps me grounded. I have found that acts of defiance, minor personal rebellions, they do well for me. They keep me spiritually that I feel like it keeps me in step with Jesus. And I always feel like I'm catching up that I'm almost stepping on his feet. So for me, baptismal identity and protesting, those are the two things come to me immediately.Tamice (02:04):Whoa, that's so deep. Wow, I never thought about that. But I never thought about protests being a thing that groundsBecause I mean I've just been, for me I would say I've been working on the right so, and y'all know me, so I got acronyms for days. But I mean I think that the radical ethical spirituality that's tethered to my tradition, that's a rule of life, but it's also a litmus test. So for me, if you can't tell the truth, we don't have conversations about non-violence and loving enemies. I don't get to ethical spirituality unless you come through the front door of truth telling and truth telling in that sense of the r. And the rest arrest mix tape is radical. Angela Davis says radical and that's grasping stuff at the root. So before we have conversations about forgiveness for instance, or Jesus or scripture or what is right and what is moral, it's very important that we first tell the truth about the foundations of those realities and what we even mean by those terms and whose those terms serve and where they come from. I talk about it asking to see the manager. We need see the manager(03:24):Me that grounds me is now if something comes in and it calls me to move in a different way or corrects me or checks me in a certain way, I say yes to it if it comes through the door of truth telling because it means I also got to be true and tell the truth to myself. So that keeps me grounded. That kind of acronym is kind of how I move, but it's also how I keep toxic ways of doing religion out. And I also have come back into relationship with trees and grass and the waters and that's been really powerful for moving down into different types of intelligence. For me, the earth has been pulling me into a different way of knowing and being in that part brings me to ancestors. Just like you starlet my ancestors, I keep finding them in the trees and in the water and in the wind. So it's like, well I need them real bad right now. So that's where I'm kind of grounding myself these days.But to your point about grounding and protest, I feel most compelled to show up in spaces where the ground is crying out screaming. I feel like it beckons me there. And we talked about the most recent news of Trey being found and you talked about truth telling and what resonated immediately. And it didn't sit right with me that African-American people, people of African descent know not to take their lives in that way because of the traumatic history that when you say things like you don't suspect any foul play, it sounds like what has historically been named as at the hands of persons unknown where that no one is held responsible for the death of African-American people. That's what ties it in for me. And I feel like it's an ancestral pool that they didn't leave this way, they didn't leave in the way that they were supposed to, that something stinks and that they're crying out to say, can you hear me? Come over here Terry a while here. Don't leave him here. Don't let up on it because we didn't call him here somebody. So I love that you said that you are, feel yourself being grounded in and call back to the earth because I do feel like it speaks to us,But there are telltale signs in it and that the trees will tell us too. And so I didn't have a hand in this. It was forced on me and I saw it all come and talk to me. Put your hand here, put your head here and you can hear me scream and then you can hear me scream, you can hear him scream. He was calling out the whole time. That's what I believe in. That's how I test reality. I tested against what the earth is saying like you said, but I think we have to walk the ground a bit. We have to pace the ground a bit. We can't just go off of what people are saying. Back to your point about truth telling, don't trust nobody I don't trust. I don't trust anybody that's going to stop because you can't fix a lie. So if you're going to come in with deception, there's not much else I can do with you. There's not much I can say to you. And I find that white body supremacy is a supreme deception. So if we can't start there in a conversation, there's nothing that I can say to youTamice (06:46):That's facts. It's interesting that you talked about baptism, you talked about grounding and I had this story pop up and while you were talking again it popped up again. So I'm going to tell it. So we are not going to talk about who and all the things that happened recently, but I had made some comments online around that and around just the choice to be blind. So I've been talking a lot about John nine and this passage where it is very clear to everyone else what's happening, but the people who refuse to see, refuse to see.So in that, I was kind of pulled into that. I was in Mississippi, I was doing some stuff for the book and this lady, a chaplain, her name is Sally Bevin, actually Sally Bevel, she walked up to me, she kept calling me, she was like, Tam me, she want to come. I have my whole family there. We were at the Mississippi Book Fair and she kept saying, Tam me, she want to come join, dah, dah, dah. Then my family walked off and they started to peruse and then she asked me again and I was like, no, I'm good. And I was screaming. I mean I'm looking in the screen and the third time she did it, it pulled me out and I was like, this woman is trying to pull me into being present. And she said to me, this is funny, starlet. I said, I feel like I need to be washed and I need a baptism because this phone feels like so on right now and the wickedness is pulling me. So she poured, she got some ice, cold water, it was 95 degrees, poured cold water on my hands, had me wash my hands and she took the cold water. She put a cross on my forehead. And you know what she said to me? She said, remember your baptism?She said, remember your baptism? And when I was baptized, even though it was by a man who will not also be named, when I was baptized the wind, there was a whirlwind at my baptism. It was in 2004, that same wind hit in Mississippi and then I felt like I was supposed to take my shoes off. So I walked around the Mississippi Festival with no shoes on, not knowing that the earth was about to receive two people who did not deserve to be hung from trees. And there's something very, I feel real talk, I feel afraid for white supremacy right now in the name of my ancestors and I feel like I'm calling on everything right now. And that's also grounding me.Starlette (09:36):I was with Mother Moses last week. I went to Dorchester County just to be with her because the people were here. Take me. I said, I'll leave them all here. I know you said there are a few here, but give me the names, give me the last names of the people because I don't have time for this. I see why she left people. I see why she was packing. So to your point, I think it's important that we talk to the ancestors faithfully, religiously. We sit down at their feet and listen for a bit about how they got over and how they got through it and let them bear witness to us. And she does it for me every time, every single time she grounds, she grounds meDanielle (10:23):Listening to you all. I was like, oh wait. It is like Luke 19 where Jesus is coming in on the show and he didn't ride in on the fanciest plane on a donkey. And if you're familiar with that culture that is not the most elevated animal, not the elevated animal to ride, it's not the elevated animal. You don't eat it. Not saying that it isn't eaten at times, but it's not right. So he rides in on that and then people are saying glory to God in the highest and they're praising him and the Pharisees are like, don't do that because it's shameful and I don't remember the exact words, but he's basically be quiet. The rocks are going to tell the story of what happened here. He's walking his way. It kind of reminds me to me. So what you're saying, he's walking away, he's going to walk and he's going to walk that way and he's going to walk to his death. He's walking it in two scenarios that Jesus goes in to talk about. Your eyes are going to be blind to peace, to the real way to peace. It's going to be a wall put around you and you're going to miss out. People are going to destroy you because you missed your chance.Starlette (11:50):Point again creation. And if you're going to be a rock headed people, then I'll recruit this rock choir. They get ready to rock out on you. If there's nothing you're going to say. So even then he says that creation will bear witness against you. You ain't got to do it. You ain't got to do it. I can call these rock. You can be rock headed if you want to. You can be stony hearted if you want to. I can recruit choir members from the ground,Tamice (12:16):But not even that because y'all know I'm into the quantum and metaphysics. Not even that they actually do speak of course, like words are frequencies. So when you hold a certain type of element in your hand, that thing has a frequency to it. That's alright that they said whatever, I don't need it from you. Everything else is tapped into this.Starlette (12:39):Right. In fact, it's the rocks are tapped into a reality. The same reality that me and this donkey and these people throwing stuff at my feet are tapped into.You are not tapped into reality. And so that's why he makes the left and not the right because typically when a person is coming to Saka city, they head towards the temple. He went the other direction because he is like it was a big fuck. I don't use power like this. And actually what I'm about to do is raise you on power. This is a whole different type of power. And that's what I feel like our ancestors, the realities that the alternative intelligence in the world you're talking about ai, the alternative intelligence in the world is what gives me every bit of confidence to look this beast in the face and call it what it is. This isTamice (13:52):And not going to bow to it. And I will go down proclaiming it what it is. I will not call wickedness good.And Jesus said, Jesus was so when he talks about the kingdom of heaven suffering violence and the violence taken it by force, it's that it's like there's something so much more violent about being right and righteous. Y'all have to use violence because you can't tell the truth.Danielle (14:29):Do you see the split two? There's two entirely different realities happening. Two different kingdoms, two entirely different ways of living in this era and they're using quote J, but it's not the same person. It can't be, you cannot mix white Jesus and brown Jesus. They don't go together. TheyStarlette (15:00):Don't, what is it? Michael O. Emerson and Glenn e Bracy. The second they have this new book called The Religion of Whiteness, and they talk about the fact that European Americans who are racialized as white Tahi says those who believe they are white. He says that there's a group of people, the European Americans who are racialized as white, who turn to scripture to enforce their supremacy. And then there's another group of people who turn to scripture to support and affirm our sibling.It is two different kingdoms. It's funny, it came to me the other day because we talk about, I've talked about how for whiteness, the perception of goodness is more important than the possession of it.You know what I mean? So mostly what they do is seek to be absolved. Right? So it's just, and usually with the being absolved means I'm less bad than that, so make that thing more bad than me and it's a really terrible way to live a life, but it is how whiteness functions, and I'm thinking about this in the context of all that is happening in the world because it's like you cannot be good and racist period. And that's as clear as you cannot love God and mammon you will end up hating one and loving the other. You cannot love God. You cannotStarlette (16:29):Love God and hate your next of kin your sibling. Dr. Angela Parker says something really important During the Wild Goose Festival, she asked the participants there predominantly European American people, those racialized as white. She said, do you all Terry, do you Terry, do you wait for the Holy Spirit? Do you sit with yourself and wait for God to move? And it talked, it spoke to me about power dynamic. Do you feel like God is doing the moving and you wait for the spirit to anoint you, to fill you, to inspire you, to baptize you with fire? You Terry, do you wait a while or do you just the other end of that that she doesn't say, do you just get up? I gave my life to Jesus and it's done right handed fellowship, give me my certificate and walk out the door. You have to sit with yourself and I don't know what your tradition is.I was raised Pentecostal holiness and I had to tear all night long. I was on my knees calling on the name of Jesus and I swear that Baba couldn't hear me. Which octave do you want me to go in? I lost my voice. You know them people, them mothers circled me with a sheet and told me I didn't get it that night that I had to come back the next day after I sweat out my down, I sweat out my press. Okay. I pressed my way trying to get to that man and they told me he didn't hear me. He not coming to get you today. I don't hear a change. They were looking for an evidence of tongues. They didn't hear an evidence, a change speech. You still sound the way that you did when you came in here. And I think that white body supremacy, that's where the problem lies with me. There's no difference. I don't hear a change in speech. You're still talking to people as if you can look down your nose with them. You have not been submerged in the water. You did not go down in the water. White supremacy, white body supremacy has not been drowned out.Terry, you need to Terry A. Little while longer. I'll let you know when you've gotten free. When you've been lifted, there's a cloud of witnesses. Those mothers rubbing your back, snapping your back and saying, call on him. Call him like you want him. Call him like you need him and they'll tell you when they see evidence, they'll let you, you know when you've been tied up, tangled up. That's what we would say. Wrapped up in Jesus and I had to come back a second night and call on the Lord and then they waited a while. They looked, they said, don't touch her, leave her alone. He got her now, leave her alone. But there was an affirmation, there was a process. You couldn't just get up there and confess these ABCs and salvation, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Why do you think they'll let you know when you got it?Danielle (18:56):Why do you think that happened? Why? I have a question for You'all. Why do you think that became the reality of the prayer in that moment? And we're talking about Africans that have been brought here and enslaved. Why do you think that happened on our soil that way? Why question?Tamice (19:12):I mean I'm wondering about it because when stylists talk and I keep thinking the Terry in and of itself is a refusal. It says what I see is not real. What's in front of me is not right. I'm going to wait for something else.I'm saying, the slave Bible, them taking stuff out of the Bible and it's like, but I feel like the ground, there was something about the ground that indigenous people, that indigenous people were able to help them tap into over here. It was waiting on that.Starlette (19:49):We didn't have punishment. We had a percussion session. So they ring shouted me. I didn't know what it was at the time. We didn't have all the fancy stuff. Everybody had put me in key. We didn't have, we had this and feet them people circled around me. We don't do that no more.Danielle (20:06):We don't do that no more. But don't you think if you're a person that is, and I believe Africans came here with faith already. Oh yes, there's evidence of that. So put that aside, but don't you think then even if you have that faith and it's not so different than our time and you're confronted with slave owners and plantation owners also preaching quote the same faith that you're going to have to test it out on your neighbor when they're getting saved. You're going to have to make sure they didn't catch that bug.Don't you think there's something in there? Block it. Don't you think if you know faith internally already like we do and run into someone that's white that's preaching the same thing, we have to wait it out with them. Don't you think our ancestors knew that when they were here they were waiting it out. I just noticed my spirit match that spirit. We have to wait it out. Yes, because and let's say they didn't know Jesus. Some people didn't know Jesus and they met Jesus here for whatever reason, and your example is still the white man. You have to wait it out to make sure you're not reflecting that evilness. I mean that's what I'm thinking. That's it's the absolutelyStarlette (21:20):Truth. There's a book titled Slave Testimony, and I know this because I just read about it. There's a testimony of an enslaved African-American, he's unnamed. It was written on June 26th, 1821. He's talking to Master John. He said, I want permission to speak to you if you please. He talked about, he said, where is it? Where is it? A few words. I hope that you will not think Me too bull. Sir, I make my wants known to you because you are, I believe the oldest and most experienced that I know of. He says in the first place, I want you to tell me the reason why you always preach to the white folks and keep your back to us is because they sit up on the hill. We have no chance among them there. We must be forgotten because we are near enough. We are not near enough without getting in the edge of the swamp behind you. He was calling him to account. He said, when you sell me, do you make sure that I'm sold to a Christian or heathen?He said, we are charged with inattention because of where their position. He said it's impossible for us to pay good attention with this chance. In fact, some of us scarce think that we are preached to it all. He says, money appears to be the object. We are carried to market and sold to the highest bidder. Never once inquired whether you sold to a heathen or a Christian. If the question was put, did you sell to a Christian, what would the answer be? I can tell you, I can tell what he was, gave me my price. That's all I was interested in. So I don't want people to believe that Africans who were enslaved did not talk back, did not speak back. They took him to task. He said, everybody's not literate. There's about one in 50 people who are, and I'm one of them and I may not be able to speak very well, but this is what I want to tell you. I can tell the difference. I know that you're not preaching to me the same. I know that when you talk about salvation, you're not extending it to me.Yikes. You need to know that our people, these ancestors, not only were they having come to Jesus meetings, but they were having come to your senses, meeting with their oppressor and they wrote it down. They wrote it down. I get sick of the narratives that we are not our answer. Yes we are. Yes I am. I'm here because of them. I think they called me. I think they call me here. I think the fussing that I make, the anger that I possess this need to resist every damn thing. I think they make me do thatTamice (23:35):Indeed, I think. But I didn't get my voice until they took the MLE off, had an honor with my ancestors and they came and they told me it's time. Take that mle off, MLE off. Shoot. Why Jesus ain't tell me to take no muzzle off. I'm going to tell you that now.Danielle (23:52):That's why I mean many indigenous people said, Jesus didn't come back for me because if that guy's bringing me Jesus, then now Jesus didn't come back for me.Starlette (24:07):Come on.Make it plain. Danielle, go ahead. Go ahead. Walk heavy today. Yeah, I meanDanielle (24:17):I like this conversation. Why Jesus, why Jesus didn't come back for us, the three of us. He didn't come back for us. It didn't come back from kids. He didn't come back for my husband. Nope. And so then therefore that we're not going to find a freedom through that. No, that's no desire to be in that.Tamice (24:33):None. And that's what I mean and making it very, very plain to people like, listen, I actually don't want to be in heaven with your Jesus heaven. With your Jesus would be hell. I actually have one,Starlette (24:47):The one that they had for us, they had an N word heaven for us where they would continue to be served and they wrote it down. It's bad for people who are blio foes who like to read those testimonies. It is bad for people who like to read white body supremacy For Phil. Yeah, they had one for us. They had separate creation narratives known as polygenetic, but they also had separate alon whereby they thought that there was a white heaven and an inward heaven.I didn't even know that. Starla, I didn't even know that because they said they want to make sure their favorite slave was there to serve them. Oh yes, the delusion. People tell me that they're white. I really do push back for a reason. What do you mean by that? I disagree with all of it. What part of it do you find agreeable? The relationship of ruling that you maintain over me? The privilege. White power. Which part of it? Which part of it is good for you and for me? How does it help us maintain relationship as Christians?Danielle (25:47):I think that's the reality and the dissonance we live in. Right?Starlette (25:51):That's it. But I think there needs to be a separation.Are you a white supremacist or not?Tamice (26:03):That's what I'm saying. That's why I keep saying, listen, at this point, you can't be good and racist. Let me just say that. Oh no, you got to pickStarlette (26:12):And I need to hear itTamice (26:13):Both. Yeah. I need you to public confession of it.Starlette (26:19):Someone sent me a dm. I just want to thank you for your work and I completely agree. I quickly turned back around. I said, say it publicly. Get out of my dms. Say it publicly. Put it on your page. Don't congratulate me. Within two minutes or so. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to disturb you. You are right. Okay. Okay. Okay. Did he post anything? No. Say it publicly. Denounce them. Come out from among them.Very, very plain. As a white supremacist or na, as a kid, as children. HowDanielle (26:56):Hard is it? I think that's what made this moment so real and it's a kind of a reality. Fresher actually for everybody to be honest, because it's a reality. All certain things have been said. All manner of things have been said by people. This is just one example of many people that have said these things. Not the only person that's lived and died and said these things. And then when you say, Hey, this was said, someone's like, they didn't say that. You're like, no, some people put all their content on the internet receipts. They did it themselves. That's not true. And I went to a prayer vigil. I didn't go. I sat outside a prayer vigil this weekend and I listened in and they were praying for the resurrection like Jesus of certain people that have passed on. I kid you, I sat there in the car with a friend of mine and then my youngest daughter had come with me just to hang out. She's like, what are they praying for? I was like, they're like, they were praying for a certain person to be resurrected from the dead just like Jesus. And I was so confused. I'm so confused how we got that far, honestly. But I told my kid, I said, this is a moment of reality for you. This is a moment to know. People think like this.Starlette (28:13):Also, white bodyDanielle (28:14):Supremacy is heresy. Yes. It's not even related to the Bible. Not at all.Why I steal away. This is why even the mistranslated Bible, even the Bible that you could take,Starlette (28:33):ThisThe version Danielle started. If you wouldn't have said that, I wouldn't have said that. This is exactly why I steal away. This is exactly why I leave. Because you can't argue with people like that. Now we're resurrected. IAll I need, it's like away. This is exactly why, because I can't hear what Howard Thurman calls the sound of the genuine in that. It's just not going to happen.Danielle (29:01):Can you imagine what would've happened if we would've prayed for George Floyd to be resurrected? Listen, what would've happenedStarlette (29:08):That he called the scumbag.Danielle (29:10):Yeah, but what would've happened if we would've played for their resurrection? Adam, Adam Polito. ThatStarlette (29:19):Was foundTamice (29:19):Psychosis.Starlette (29:21):Yeah. What would've happened? See, don't push me now. I feel like I need to pack. As soon as I said fill away, it's like people keep saying, what are you going to do if gets worse? I'm going to leave my, I'll sell all this crapAbout this stuff. This booby trap of capitalism. I'll it all don't about none of it. What matters most to me is my sense of ness. And when you get to talking, I almost said talking out the side of your neck. Jesus God, today, lemme God Jesus of your neck. You just need to know that's a cultural thing. That's going to have to be reevaluated. God. It just came right on out. Oh Lord. When you start saying things that go against my sense of ness that you think that I have to defend my personhood, that you want to tell me that I don't exist as a person. I don't exist as a human. Back to your reality testament. It's time for me to leave. I'm not staying here and fighting a race war or a civil war. You mamas are just violent. It's what you've always been.Tamice (30:28):Why would I stand in the middle? Why would I stand in the middle of what I know is a confrontation with yourself?Starlette (30:36):Oh, okay. Alright. I'm going to justTamice (30:38):You all. What happened last week is it, it is a confrontation with a really disturbed self and they're trying to flip it. Oh yes. They're trying to make it. Yes. But this is like, I'm trying to tell people out here, this is beyond you, Jack, that was a prophetic witness against you because now you see that what you're fighting is the mirror. Keep me out of it. I won't fight your wars. Keep me out of it. Look, James Baldwin said, y'all have to decide and figure out why you needed a nigger in the first place.I'm not a nigger. I'm a man. But you, the white people need to figure out why you created the nigger in the first place. Fuck, this is not my problem. This is a y'all and I don't have anything invested in this. All I'm trying to do is raise my kids, man. Come on. Get out of here with that. I'm sorry.Danielle (31:48):No, you keep going and then go back to starlet. Why do you think then they made her Terry? They had to make sure she doesn't buy into that. That's my opinion.Tamice (32:00):It's funny too because I see, I mean, I wasn't Pentecostal. I feel like who's coming to mind as soon as you said that de y'all know I'm hip hop. Right? So KRS one.Starlette (32:12):Yes. Consciousness.Tamice (32:14):The mind. Oh yes, the mind, the imagination. He was, I mean from day one, trying to embed that in the youth. Like, Hey, the battlefield is the mind. Are you going to internalize this bullshit?Are you going to let them name you?Starlette (32:34):This is the word.Tamice (32:34):Are you going to let them tell you what is real for the people of God? That's That's what I'm saying, man. Hip hop, hip hop's, refusal has been refusal from day one. That's why I trust it.Because in seen it, it came from the bottom of this place. It's from the bottom of your shoe. It tells the truth about all of this. So when I listen to hip hop, I know I'm getting the truth.Starlette (32:57):Yeah. EnemyObjection. What did public enemy say? Can't trust it. Can't trust it. No, no, no, no. You got to play it back. We got to run all that back.Danielle (33:11):I just think how it's so weaponized, the dirt, the bottom of the shoe, all of that stuff. But that's where we actually, that's what got it. Our bodies hitting the road, hitting the pavement, hitting the grass, hitting the dirt. That's how we know we're in reality because we've been forced to in many ways and have a mindset that we are familiar with despite socioeconomic changes. We're familiar with that bottom place.Tamice (33:38):Yeah. I mean, bottom place is where God is at. That's what y'all don't understand. God comes from black, dark dirt, like God is coming from darkness and hiddenness and mystery. You don't love darkness. You don't love GodStarlette (33:56):Talk. Now this bottom place is not to be confused with the sunken place that some of y'all are in. I just want to be clear. I just want to be clear and I'm not coming to get you. Fall was the wrong day. TodayI think it's good though because there's so much intimidation in other communities at times. I'm not saying there's not through the lynchings, ongoing lynchings and violence too and the threats against colleges. But it's good for us to be reminded of our different cultural perspectives and hear people talk with power. Why do you think Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez wrote letters to each other? They knew something about that and knew something about it. They knew something about it. They knew something about why it's important to maintain the bonds. Why we're different, why we're similar. They knew something about it. So I see it as a benefit and a growth in our reality. That is actually what threatens that, that relationship, that bond, that connection, that speaking life into one another. That's what threatens that kingdom that you're talking about. Yeah.You just can't fake an encounter either.When I was tear, no matter what I've decolonized and divested from and decentered, I cannot deny that experience. I know that God was present. I know that God touched me. So when mother even made sister, even made, my grandmother would call me when I was in college, first person to go to college. In our family, she would say before she asked about classes or anything else, and she really didn't know what to ask. She only had a sixth grade education. But her first question was always you yet holding on?Right. She holding on. And I said, yes ma'am. Yes ma'am. Then she would, because it didn't matter if you couldn't keep the faith. There really wasn't nothing else for her to talk to you about. She was going to get ready to evangelize and get you back because you backslid. But that was her first thing. But what I've learned since then is that I can let go.The amazing thing is that the spirit is guiding me. I didn't let go all together. You got it. You got it. If it's real, if you're real, prove it. Demonstrate it. I'm getting chills now talk to me without me saying anything, touch me. I shouldn't have to do anything. Eugene Peterson says that prayer is answering speech. In fact, the only reason why I'm praying is because you said something to me first. It's not really on me to do anything. Even with the tear. I was already touched. I was already called. The reason why I was on my knees and pleading is because I'd already been compelled. Something had had already touched me. FirstThey called Holy Spirit. The hound of heaven. Damn right was already on my heels. I was already filled before I could even refuse. I was like, I don't want this. I'm going to always be star Jonah, get your people. I prefer fish guts. Throw me overboard. I don't like these people. Certified prophet because I don't want to do it. I never want to do it. I'm not interested at all. I have no too much history. I've had to deal with too much white body supremacy and prejudice and racism to want anything to do with the church. I see it for what? It's I'll never join one. By the way, are we recording? Is it on? I'm never joining a church ever. Until you all desegregate.You desegregate. Then we can talk about your ministry of reconciliation. Until then, you don't have one. Don't talk to me about a community day or a pulpit swap. I don't want to hear it. All Your praise. What did he say? A clinging, stumble, put away from me. Your conferences, all your multiracial. I don't want to hear none of it. Desegregate that part desegregate you, hypocrites, woe unto all of you white supremacists. If nobody ever told you that's not God. It's not of God. So I don't, for me, my reality is so above me, I know that Paul, because when I don't want to say anything, somebody is in my ear. Somebody was talking to me this morning. Somebody was writing a note in my ear. I had to get up. I said, please. I'm like, now I'm not even awake all the way. Stop talking to me. You can't fake that as much as I push against the Holy Spirit. You can't fake that. I don't want to do it. I don't want to say it. I'm of saying it. And yet I get up in the morning and it's like, say this, that post that. Write that. Somebody else is doing that. That's not me.As the mothers say, my flesh is weak. My flesh is not willing at all. I want to, all of y'all can go on. I'll pack this up and move somewhere else. Let them fight it to the death. I'm not going to, this is just my flesh speaking. Forgive me. Okay. This Raceless gospel is a calling friends. It's a calling. It's a calling, which means you coming into it. I'm an itinerant prophet. I'm heavy into the Hebrew scriptures. I come up with every excuse. My throat hurts. I got a speech impediment. The people don't like me. I'm not educated. It don't work. You need to know when people come to you and say, y'all need to get together, God speaking to you, the Pendo is coming. That's not like an invitation. That's kind of like a threat whether you want it or not. You're getting together.Everybody up. There's a meal ready, there's a banquet that is set and the food is getting cold and you are the reason why the drinks are watered down. That's go. You don't hear me calling you. ComeWhat I keep hearing. You have to know that God is speaking to people and saying that there's an invitation coming and you better get right. You better get washed up. Tam me said, you better let somebody pour that water over your hands. You better get washed up and get ready for dinner. I'm calling you. Come on in this house. Come on in this house. And this house is for everybody. Martin Luther King called it the world house. Everybody's coming in and you ain't got to like it doesn't matter. Get somewhere and sit down. That's that old church mother coming out of me and lemme just confess. I didn't even want to be on here this morning. I told God I didn't feel like talking. I told the Lord and you see what happened.Promise you. I'm a child. I'm full of disobedience.I was not in the mood. I said, I don't want to talk to nobody. I'm an introvert. I don't want to deal with none of this. Get somebody else to do it and look at it.Tamice (40:39):Yeah. It's funny because I woke up this morning, I was like, I'm not, I forgot. And then after all of the news today, I was like, I just don't have it in you, but this is, wait a minute. And it was three minutes past the time. Come on. And I was like, oh, well shoot. The house is empty. Nobody's here right now. I was like, well, lemme just log on. So this is definitely, it feels like definitely our calling do feel. I feel that way. I don't have time to bullshitSo I can't get out of it. I can't go to bed. I might as well say something. It won't let me go. I cannot do deceit. I can't do it. I can't sit idly by while people lie on God. I can't do that. I can't do it. It won't let up. And I'm trying to get in my body, get in this grass and get a little space. But I'm telling you, it won't let me go. And I feel it's important, Dee, you can't stop doing what you're doing. That's right. I mean is this thing of it is beyond me. It is living out of me. It's coming through me. And there has to be a reason for this. There's got to be a reason for this. And I don't know what it is because I know my eschatology is different, but I feel like, buddy, we got to manifest this kingdom. We have to manifest it until it pushes all that shit back. Come on. I'm telling you. Till it scurries it away or renders it and null and void, I'm talking. I mean, I want the type of light and glory on my being. That wicked logic disintegrate, wicked people drop dead. I mean that just in the Bible. In the Bible where Hert falls, headlong and worms eat em. Y'all celebrate that. Why can't I think about that? It's in your scriptures or daykin and the thing breaks and the legs of this false God break. I want that. I'm here for that. I'm going after that.Danielle (43:14):You think that this is what the definition of Terry is? That we're all Terry serious. I'm rocking the whole time. I'm serious. Right. That's what I told my kids. I said, in one sense, this is a one person of many that thinks this way. So we can't devote all our conversation in our house to this man. And I said in the other sense, because Starlet was asking me before he got here, how you doing? I said, we got up and I took calls from this person and that person and I told my kids, we're still advocating and doing what we can for the neighbors that need papers. And so we're going to continue doing that. That is the right thing to do. No matter what anybody else is doing in the world, we can do this.Tamice (43:56):Yeah, that's a good call. I mean, I'm headed to, I ain't going to say where I'm going no more, but I'm headed somewhere and going to be with people who are doing some innovation, right. Thinking how do we build a different world? How do our skillsets and passions coalesce and become something other than this? So I'm excited about that. And it's like that fire, it doesn't just drive me to want to rebuke. It does drive me to want to rebuild and rethink how we do everything. And I'm willing, I mean, I know that I don't know about y'all, but I feel like this, I'm getting out of dodge, but also I'm seeking the piece of the city. I feel both. I feel like I'm not holding hands with ridiculousness and I'm not moving in foolishness. But also I'm finna seek the piece of the city. My G I'm not running from delusion. Why would I? I'm in the truth. So I don't know how that maps onto a practical life, but we're finna figure it out. Out in it. I mean, the response of leadership to what has happened is a very clear sign where we are in terms of fascism. That's a very clear sign.What else y'all are looking for To tell you what it is.Danielle (45:36):But also we're the leaders. We are, we're the leaders. They're a leader of something, but they're not the leader of us. We're the leaders. We're the leaders. So no matter what they say, no matter what hate they spew, I really love Cesar Chavez. He's like, I still go out and feed the farm worker and I don't make them get on the boycott line because if they're pushed under the dirt, then they can't see hope. So people that have more economic power, a little more privilege than the other guy, we're the leaders. We're the ones that keep showing up in love. And love is a dangerous thing for these folks. They can't understand it. They can't grasp it. It is violent for them to feel love. Bodies actually reject it. And the more we show up, you're innovating. You're speaking Starla, you're preaching. We're the leaders. They're leaders of something. They're not leaders of us. We're leaders of freedom.Tamice (46:31):Come on now. D, we're leaders of give us thisStarlette (46:34):Bomb. We're leaders of compassion. You coming in here with the Holy Ghosts, acting like one of them church mothers. We were in the room together. She put our hand on us. YouDanielle (46:43):We're the ones that can remember Trey. We're the ones that can call for justice. We don't need them to do it. They've never done it. Right. Anyway. They have never showed up for a Mexican kid. They've never showed up for a black kid. They've never done it. Right. Anyway, we're the ones that can do it now. We have access to technology. We have access to our neighbors. We can bring a meal to a friend. We can give dollars to someone that needs gas. We're the the one doing it. We're the one that doing itTamice (47:11):Fill usDanielle (47:12):Up. They cannot take away our love.Starlette (47:15):Receive the benediction.Danielle: Yeah. They can't take it away. I'm telling you, if I saw someone shooting someone I hate, I would try to save that person. I don't own guns. I don't believe in guns, period. My family, that's my personal family's belief.And I would do that. I've thought about it many times. I thought would I do it? And I think I would because I actually believe that. I believe that people should not be shot dead. I believe that for the white kid. I believe that for the Mexican kid. I believe that for the black kid, we're the people that can show up. They're not going to come out here. They're inviting us to different kind of war. We're not in that war. That's right. We have love on our side and you cannot defeat love, kill love. You can'tTamice (48:04):Kill love and you can't kill life. That's the only reason somebody would ask you to be nonviolent. That's the only way somebody would've the audacity to ask that of you. Especially if you're oppressed. If the true is truth is that you can't kill love or life, damn man. It's hard out here for a pimp.Starlette (48:38):Really. Really? Yeah. Because what I really want to say isTamice (49:27):I can't. Your testimony a lie. No. Your testimony. That would be a lie. And like I said, truth telling is important. But there are days where I could be that I could go there, but I witnessed what happened that day. I watched the video. It's just not normal to watch that happen to anybody. And I don't care who you are. And the fact that we're there is just objectively just wow. And the fact that all of the spin and do y'all not realize what just happened? Just as a actual event. Right. What? You know, I'm saying how has this turned into diatribes? Right? We need reform. I, whichDanielle (50:29):Which, okay, so I have to cut us off. I have a client coming, but I want to hear from you, given all the nuance and complexity, how are you going to take care of your body this week or even just today? It doesn't have to be genius. Just one or two things you're going to do. Oh, I'm going toTamice (50:51):Take a nap. Yeah, you taking a nap? Y'all be so proud of me. I literally just said no to five things. I was like, I'm not coming to this. I'm not doing that. I won't be at this. I'm grieving. I'm go sit in the grass. Yeah, that's what I'm doing today. And I have stuff coming up. I'm like, Nope, I'm not available.Starlette (51:14):What about you Danielle? What are you going to do?Danielle (51:16):I'm going to eat scrambled eggs with no salt. I love that. I've grown my liver back so I have to have no salt. But I do love scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs. That's the truth. Four. Four scrambled eggs.Starlette (51:31):And we thank you for your truth. BIO:The Reverend Dr. Starlette Thomas is a poet, practical theologian, and itinerant prophet for a coming undivided “kin-dom.” She is the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, named for her work and witness and an associate editor at Good Faith Media. Starlette regularly writes on the sociopolitical construct of race and its longstanding membership in the North American church. Her writings have been featured in Sojourners, Red Letter Christians, Free Black Thought, Word & Way, Plough, Baptist News Global and Nurturing Faith Journal among others. She is a frequent guest on podcasts and has her own. The Raceless Gospel podcast takes her listeners to a virtual church service where she and her guests tackle that taboo trinity— race, religion, and politics. Starlette is also an activist who bears witness against police brutality and most recently the cultural erasure of the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. It was erected in memory of the 2020 protests that brought the world together through this shared declaration of somebodiness after the gruesome murder of George Perry Floyd, Jr. Her act of resistance caught the attention of the Associated Press. An image of her reclaiming the rubble went viral and in May, she was featured in a CNN article.Starlette has spoken before the World Council of Churches North America and the United Methodist Church's Council of Bishops on the color- coded caste system of race and its abolition. She has also authored and presented papers to the members of the Baptist World Alliance in Zurich, Switzerland and Nassau, Bahamas to this end. She has cast a vision for the future of religion at the National Museum of African American History and Culture's “Forward Conference: Religions Envisioning Change.” Her paper was titled “Press Forward: A Raceless Gospel for Ex- Colored People Who Have Lost Faith in White Supremacy.” She has lectured at The Queen's Foundation in Birmingham, U.K. on a baptismal pedagogy for antiracist theological education, leadership and ministries. Starlette's research interests have been supported by the Louisville Institute and the Lilly Foundation. Examining the work of the Reverend Dr. Clarence Jordan, whose farm turned “demonstration plot” in Americus, Georgia refused to agree to the social arrangements of segregation because of his Christian convictions, Starlette now takes this dirt to the church. Her thesis is titled, “Afraid of Koinonia: How life on this farm reveals the fear of Christian community.” A full circle moment, she was recently invited to write the introduction to Jordan's newest collection of writings, The Inconvenient Gospel: A Southern Prophet Tackles War, Wealth, Race and Religion.Starlette is a member of the Christian Community Development Association, the Peace & Justice Studies Association, and the Koinonia Advisory Council. A womanist in ministry, she has served as a pastor as well as a denominational leader. An unrepentant academician and bibliophile, Starlette holds degrees from Buffalo State College, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and Wesley Theological Seminary. Last year, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in Sacred Theology for her work and witness as a public theologian from Wayland Baptist Theological Seminary. She is the author of "Take Me to the Water": The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church and a contributing author of the book Faith Forward: A Dialogue on Children, Youth & a New Kind of Christianity. Dr. Tamice Spencer - HelmsGod is not a weapon.  Authenticity is not a phase.Meet  Tamice Spencer-Helms (they/she). Tamice is a nonprofit leader, scholar-practitioner, pastor, and theoactivist based in Richmond, Virginia. For decades, Tamice has been guided by a singular purpose: to confront and heal what they call “diseased imagination”—the spiritual and social dis-ease that stifles agency, creativity, and collective flourishing. As a pastor for spiritual fugitives,  Tamice grounds their work at the intersection of social transformation, soulful leadership, womanist and queer liberation theologies, and cultural critique.A recognized voice in theoactivism, Tamice's work bridges the intellectual and the embodied, infusing rigorous scholarship with lived experience and spiritual practice. They hold two master's degrees (theology and leadership) and a doctorate in Social Transformation. Their frameworks, such as R.E.S.T. Mixtape and Soulful Leadership, which are research and evidence-based interventions that invite others into courageous truth-telling, radical belonging, and the kind of liberating leadership our times demand.​Whether facilitating retreats, speaking from the stage, consulting for organizations, or curating digital sanctuaries, Tamice's presence is both refuge and revolution. Their commitment is to help individuals and communities heal, reimagine, and build spaces where every person is seen, known, and liberated—where diseased imagination gives way to new possibilities. Kitsap County & Washington State Crisis and Mental Health ResourcesIf you or someone else is in immediate danger, please call 911.This resource list provides crisis and mental health contacts for Kitsap County and across Washington State.Kitsap County / Local ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They OfferSalish Regional Crisis Line / Kitsap Mental Health 24/7 Crisis Call LinePhone: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/24/7 emotional support for suicide or mental health crises; mobile crisis outreach; connection to services.KMHS Youth Mobile Crisis Outreach TeamEmergencies via Salish Crisis Line: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://sync.salishbehavioralhealth.org/youth-mobile-crisis-outreach-team/Crisis outreach for minors and youth experiencing behavioral health emergencies.Kitsap Mental Health Services (KMHS)Main: 360‑373‑5031; Toll‑free: 888‑816‑0488; TDD: 360‑478‑2715Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/Outpatient, inpatient, crisis triage, substance use treatment, stabilization, behavioral health services.Kitsap County Suicide Prevention / “Need Help Now”Call the Salish Regional Crisis Line at 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/Suicide-Prevention-Website.aspx24/7/365 emotional support; connects people to resources; suicide prevention assistance.Crisis Clinic of the PeninsulasPhone: 360‑479‑3033 or 1‑800‑843‑4793Website: https://www.bainbridgewa.gov/607/Mental-Health-ResourcesLocal crisis intervention services, referrals, and emotional support.NAMI Kitsap CountyWebsite: https://namikitsap.org/Peer support groups, education, and resources for individuals and families affected by mental illness.Statewide & National Crisis ResourcesResourceContact InfoWhat They Offer988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (WA‑988)Call or text 988; Website: https://wa988.org/Free, 24/7 support for suicidal thoughts, emotional distress, relationship problems, and substance concerns.Washington Recovery Help Line1‑866‑789‑1511Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesHelp for mental health, substance use, and problem gambling; 24/7 statewide support.WA Warm Line877‑500‑9276Website: https://www.crisisconnections.org/wa-warm-line/Peer-support line for emotional or mental health distress; support outside of crisis moments.Native & Strong Crisis LifelineDial 988 then press 4Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resourcesCulturally relevant crisis counseling by Indigenous counselors.Additional Helpful Tools & Tips• Behavioral Health Services Access: Request assessments and access to outpatient, residential, or inpatient care through the Salish Behavioral Health Organization. Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/SBHO-Get-Behaviroal-Health-Services.aspx• Deaf / Hard of Hearing: Use your preferred relay service (for example dial 711 then the appropriate number) to access crisis services.• Warning Signs & Risk Factors: If someone is talking about harming themselves, giving away possessions, expressing hopelessness, or showing extreme behavior changes, contact crisis resources immediately. Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

The Arise Podcast – Edited TranscriptSpeaker 1 (00:29):Welcome to the Rise Podcast. As part of this process, we're going to talk about what reality is—how to find it, and how to ground yourself in it. I'll have some regular co-hosts with me, as I mentioned earlier, and we'll continue to explore faith, gender, race, sex, the church—all in the context of discovering reality.Today is September 10, 2025. As I pushed to get this episode out, plans shifted and things got canceled. I was busy with the kids, checking the news, scrolling Instagram, running errands, picking up sandwiches—just an ordinary day. Then I saw the headline: Charlie Kirk had been shot.Interestingly, Charlie Kirk and I disagree on almost everything, but I've occasionally listened to his podcast. I also listen to the Midas Touch podcast and others across the spectrum to understand what people are thinking and believing.(01:47)I ask myself: what reality am I living in, and whose voices am I letting in? When I have the capacity, I listen to people like Charlie Kirk, sometimes tune in to Fox News, check X/Twitter, or look at Truth Social—just to gauge different perspectives.I live on Squamish land—land of cedar and clear salt water—here in Poulsbo, Washington. Kitsap County is an interesting rural mix. We're near Seattle, often labeled “ultra-liberal,” but that doesn't exempt us from racism, elitism, or entrenched power structures. And our rural neighbors may identify as fiscally or socially conservative. You might meet someone who voted very differently from you—someone who will happily bring you cookies, or someone who might actually despise you.(02:48)This mix, I think, is closer to reality than living in silos. We may choose echo chambers for news, but we still rub shoulders at coffee shops, restaurants, gyms, and schools with people who think differently.I keep asking: how do we find a shared space to even talk? How do we locate common reality?Back in 2020, when George Floyd was murdered, I saw deep fractures emerge. I was just starting therapy groups on race and whiteness. Our diverse group gathered to talk about racism at a time when the country seemed ready for those conversations.(04:54)But quickly I noticed what I call splitting—fracturing when someone said something others couldn't accept or even register in their bodies. It sometimes caused silence or confusion, and often led to sharp, even violent words meant to wound. And often the person speaking didn't realize the harm.This fascinated me as a therapist. From a psychological perspective, I began to wonder: which part of ourselves shows up in everyday interactions? At a store, maybe just a polite hello. With a friend, maybe a brief check-in that still doesn't touch the day's deeper feelings.(07:07)Sometimes those layers of relationship reveal unspoken emotions—feelings inside that remain hidden. Healthy boundaries are normal, but there's no guarantee that with those we love we suddenly share every vulnerable part of ourselves.Now add politics, faith, love, gender, culture: more layers. Many of these parts trace back to childhood—traumas, arguments, experiences at school or with caregivers.(08:15)So when I see splitting—what some call polarization, black-and-white or binary thinking, or even “boundaries as weapons”—I see people wrestling with what it means to be a neighbor and to engage someone who thinks radically differently.I feel the temptation myself to label everything all good or all bad. Children need that kind of distinction to learn what's safe and unsafe, but adults must grow beyond it. Two things can be true at the same time: you hurt me, and I still love you and will show up. Yet our world increasingly tells us that can't be true.(11:05)This pressure to split is intense—internally, from media, from social circles, from family. Sometimes I want to run away into the woods, start a farm, keep my kids home, just stay safe. Today, after news of a school shooting and Charlie Kirk's murder, that desire feels even stronger.There are days I simply cannot engage with people who think differently. Other days, I have more capacity.So where is reality? For me, it's grounding in faith—literally planting my feet on the earth, hugging a tree, touching grass.(13:30)I ask: who is God? Who is Jesus? And who have I been told God and Jesus are? I grew up in a rigid evangelical structure—shaped by purity culture and fear of punishment. I remember hearing, “If God calls you and you don't act, He'll move on and you'll be left behind.” Even now, at 47, that idea haunts me.When I meet people from that tradition, I feel the urge to split—making my perspective all right and theirs all wrong. I have to remind myself of their humanity and of God's love for them.Earlier this year, I chose to resist those splits. I called people where relationships felt scratchy or unresolved, inviting conversation. Not everyone responded, but the practice helped loosen old binds.(16:55)I also keep listening to multiple viewpoints. I never “followed” Charlie Kirk, but I'd check his posts and sometimes feel genuine tenderness when he shared about his family. That's part of loving your enemies—remembering their humanity, even when you feel anger or rage.I grew up surrounded by conservative media. I even remember the early days of Fox News. As a teen reading Time magazine, I once told my parents that Michael Dukakis's policies aligned more with my faith than his opponent's. Over time I drifted toward trickle-down economics, but that early instinct still stands out.(21:22)All of us are socialized into certain beliefs. I went from conservative evangelical spaces to a conservative liberal-arts college. People warned I might “lose my faith,” yet those history classes deepened it. Today many claim that consuming certain media will “distort your reality.” Political violence is rising. I listen to both progressive and conservative podcasts to understand different lives. Yet when I cite something I've heard, I'm often told it's “AI-generated” or “fake,” even when it's a direct quote. Liberals do this too, around issues like Palestine, policing, or healthcare.(24:47)It's painful to be around people who think differently. The question is: how do we converse without devolving into hate or shouting?Today is September 11. Between Charlie Kirk's assassination, yesterday's school shooting, and attempted political killings, it's clear our nation is split into competing realities that shape everything—from how we see safety to how we practice faith and empathy.This podcast is about examining those realities and how we process them.(26:44)Sometimes we retreat inward to cope with trauma—what psychology might call dissociation or a psychic retreat. I understand the instinct to step back for safety.Maybe these divisions always existed, and I just see them more clearly now while raising my children. That responsibility feels heavy.(29:12)I often turn to elders and their words—Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” They remind me others have endured violence and hatred and still held onto hope and faith.I fight for that same hope now.(30:04)To ground ourselves we can:- Connect with the earth: literally touch the ground, trees, water.- Stay in community: share meals, exchange help, build fences together.- Nourish faith: draw on spiritual wisdom.- Cherish family: use loved ones as emotional barometers.- Engage work and service: notice how they shape and sustain us.- Face issues of race and justice: ask if we contribute to harm or to healing.Your grounding pillars may differ, but these guide me.(32:40)I invite you to this journey. You may agree or disagree—that's okay. We need space to coexist when it feels like only one side can survive.Violence won't change hearts. Bullets cannot replace ballots. Money cannot buy joy or transformation. Only sustained dialogue and care can.(34:05)I'll share some quotes from Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez in the show notes. Please stay curious and seek the mental-health support you need. Don't be alone in your grief or fear. If you feel triggered or overwhelmed, reach out—to a therapist, pastor, trusted friend, or crisis helpline.A special guest and new co-host will join me next week. I look forward to continuing the conversation.   Crisis Resources:Kitsap County & Washington State Crisis and Mental Health ResourcesIf you or someone else is in immediate danger, please call 911.This resource list provides crisis and mental health contacts for Kitsap County and across Washington State.Kitsap County / Local ResourcesResource Contact Info What They OfferSalish Regional Crisis Line / Kitsap Mental Health 24/7 Crisis Call Line Phone: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/ 24/7 emotional support for suicide or mental health crises; mobile crisis outreach; connection to services.KMHS Youth Mobile Crisis Outreach Team Emergencies via Salish Crisis Line: 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://sync.salishbehavioralhealth.org/youth-mobile-crisis-outreach-team/ Crisis outreach for minors and youth experiencing behavioral health emergencies.Kitsap Mental Health Services (KMHS) Main: 360‑373‑5031; Toll‑free: 888‑816‑0488; TDD: 360‑478‑2715Website: https://www.kitsapmentalhealth.org/crisis-24-7-services/ Outpatient, inpatient, crisis triage, substance use treatment, stabilization, behavioral health services.Kitsap County Suicide Prevention / “Need Help Now” Call the Salish Regional Crisis Line at 1‑888‑910‑0416Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/Suicide-Prevention-Website.aspx 24/7/365 emotional support; connects people to resources; suicide prevention assistance.Crisis Clinic of the Peninsulas Phone: 360‑479‑3033 or 1‑800‑843‑4793Website: https://www.bainbridgewa.gov/607/Mental-Health-Resources Local crisis intervention services, referrals, and emotional support.NAMI Kitsap County Website: https://namikitsap.org/ Peer support groups, education, and resources for individuals and families affected by mental illness.Statewide & National Crisis ResourcesResource Contact Info What They Offer988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (WA‑988) Call or text 988; Website: https://wa988.org/ Free, 24/7 support for suicidal thoughts, emotional distress, relationship problems, and substance concerns.Washington Recovery Help Line 1‑866‑789‑1511Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resources Help for mental health, substance use, and problem gambling; 24/7 statewide support.WA Warm Line 877‑500‑9276Website: https://www.crisisconnections.org/wa-warm-line/ Peer-support line for emotional or mental health distress; support outside of crisis moments.Native & Strong Crisis Lifeline Dial 988 then press 4Website: https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/injury-and-violence-prevention/suicide-prevention/hotline-text-and-chat-resources Culturally relevant crisis counseling by Indigenous counselors.Additional Helpful Tools & Tips• Behavioral Health Services Access: Request assessments and access to outpatient, residential, or inpatient care through the Salish Behavioral Health Organization. Website: https://www.kitsap.gov/hs/Pages/SBHO-Get-Behaviroal-Health-Services.aspx• Deaf / Hard of Hearing: Use your preferred relay service (for example dial 711 then the appropriate number) to access crisis services.• Warning Signs & Risk Factors: If someone is talking about harming themselves, giving away possessions, expressing hopelessness, or showing extreme behavior changes, contact crisis resources immediately.  Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

 Spiritual Abuse, Christianity and the Election with Guest HostChristian Nationalism and Spiritual Abuse: A 90 minute workshop with Jenny McGrath (click here to register)w/Danielle S. Castillejo and Jenny McGrathAre you confused about what is going on in the US? Do you feel triggered about past spiritual abuse when you see certain elected officials and faith leaders using harmful rhetoric? Are you wanting understanding and tools to navigate this present moment? You are not alone!  Danielle Castillejo and I have been researching the various tributaries of white supremacy via Christian nationalism and spiritual abuse for years now. We are devastated to see what is playing out post Trump's election, but we are not surprised.In early 2025 Danielle and I will be beginning groups for individuals who are wanting to process, grieve, and learn more about spiritual abuse and it's various intersections with race. For now we are offering an introductory workshop to help individuals feel empowered to know what is going on. This workshop is hybrid- you can join online or in person in Poulsbo, Washington.We will not be giving all of the answers, but we will be giving a framework of “purity culture” and how that has fostered violence based on race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality since the inception of the US. What is going on right now is not new, but many people are awakening to it for the first time.Stay awake. Come learn with us how we can resist, together. Note: This workshop will be recorded and made available for future purchase. Speaker 1 (00:13):Welcome to the ARise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and the church. And tune in and listen to this conversation today. Hey, thanks for joining me today. We've been talking about getting together, I think, in this format on a podcast since before the election, but obviously the election happened. It was a hectic season. I know for me, and I know for you, I want to hear about how that has been as well. But even just as we were kind of saying hello, we're leading in, I could tell like, oh man, shit, there's so many emotions that possibly come up. So we talked about talking about spiritual abuse, the election, and the role of Christianity in that. And for me, it's been so confusing. I grew up a really strict evangelical church. When Fox News appeared on the scene, my dad was watching Fox News and I was watching Fox News, and I've been trying to trace back, did I ever have any dissonance with this?(01:22):And I remember some of the first things when I was a kid, like reading a Time magazine about the election and wondering to myself, why do Christians, the Christians I was with, why do they support Republicans? Why are they against social programs? And then when the Iraq war was going on, it felt very clear to me that SDA Hus saying that they were lying about what was happening in the Middle East. But I didn't understand how all of the Republicans that were kind of pushing this narrative about Iraq, why didn't anybody even ask just simple history majors becauseSpeaker 2 (02:02):It'sSpeaker 1 (02:02):Obvious. So those are kind of some of the origins. I remember kind of questioning my roots and questioning the narrative of say, Fox News. And now I know there's, there's Charlie Kirk, there's all these other podcast out there kind of rebranding Fox News talking points. But I mean, where that intersected with faith for me is just like, well, how do I even talk about a character like Jesus with someone from that old place when I don't really know if we're talking about the same person anymore? In fact, it's fairly clear to me that it's not the same guy. And who's that guy in the Bible? It's been very confusing for me, but I'm just curious, how do you even open up to think about those questions and kind of the topics?Speaker 2 (02:51):Yeah, I mean, I resonate with the confusion and definitely feel that too. And I think it's one of those things where when I try to pull it apart and get some footing on where I'm at and what I think about it, it is hard to know where to start. Even your words about, okay, Fox News came out, my dad's watching this. I'm watching this. I'm a little confused, but also not quite sure what to make of it or how to even approach the dissonance that I'm experiencing. It goes back so far and so in the air water that it feels hard to disentangle. But I mean, I'm with you and feel so much of that same confusion. And I think even being in a red state, very red state, very conservative, very evangelical area, it's almost as if the Jesus and the political views are not for many.(04:09):And I am sure this is not limited to this area, but one of the things I experienced is it's not even, you can't even question, you can't even ask the question, the question of, wait, what's actually happening here? What is someone who actually has a degree in history in Middle Eastern politics? You can't even ask those questions because those questions are a sign that you're doubting or that you've moved to the other side. And so there's such a blindness, and if you go away from us, you're wrong. So much fear. And to pull Jesus apart from that, it very much does feel like a different, we're talking about a different Jesus, which is super disorienting, right? Because we might use the same verses or verses from the same Bible or we celebrate the same holidays, or it feels very disorienting and very confusing.Speaker 1 (05:21):Yeah. I think this idea that Jesus was about love or is something of love, that he was defiant towards religious Pharisees and the people that were persecuting others in the name of religion, it's very interesting then to see one part of my family feel like they're being persecuted and in response to that persecution, they're asking for a king. Or maybe the thing that came to me was the crowd chanting when Jesus was getting ready to be crucified. And the crowd, they're like, the Romans are like, well, who do you want? And they're like, of course we want Barbi. We want the insurrectionist. We want the murderer, the cheater. That's the person we want. Let's kill Jesus. I'm not equating our political figures to Jesus and Barbi, but the idea that we will take even hearkening back to the Old Testament times that we'll take, we need a king, give us a king that somehow the politics, we need politics to save us that Jesus isn't enough anymore. And I don't know when that kind of gets mixed together, the power almost becomes unbearable to fight against, especially if you're on your own.Speaker 2 (06:40):Yeah. Yes. I was actually thinking about this morning how much I think, and I don't know enough about international politics to speak to anything outside of the us, but it feels like our spirituality, especially within the evangelical church in the US, has gotten. So I, I don't know that I would necessarily call myself an evangelical anymore, but that body, which carries a lot of weight, a lot of numbers, a lot of passion in our country, the spirituality has been so fused with politics that it does feel like we need a certain political movement to save us. And I think that could be said on the other side too, in some ways, and I guess in my own, as I've tried to parse out where am I at, where is my spirituality, politics are important, and I feel that we need to vote in line with how we feel, where we find ourselves in terms of our spirituality. And yet Jesus is the rescuer, not a certain political party. And what does that mean? I don't even know how to exist in the midst of where we're at today with that being true, and then it feels so hard to pull apart.Speaker 1 (08:23):Yeah, I mean, for me, I know it hearkens back to so many other places in my life, I've felt powerless against a huge system, or I think specifically in churches where the goal is to has often, well, my experience or the churches that I've been in, the goal has been to preserve the power of a particular pastor or a particular set of pastors and to shield them from any consequences of any ways they might act in the community or individually one-on-one for instance with women. And then I've had the feeling in these circumstances where I just have to take it. I have to take it. I have to move on. I have to accept that God works in this way, that all things work together for good. And that's the same feeling I have right now post-election, that feeling like, okay, this is what's meant to be. This is what God has ordained. You should just take it. And I'm having that similar feeling,Speaker 2 (09:32):Which is not right. That's not, of course, I mean, I'm resonating with what you're saying and feel that deeply, and that is a deep part of my story as well. And of course our bodies go to that. Our bodies are going to go to that story of, okay, this is how we function in the midst of this powerlessness of being within this system or up against this thing that we don't have any, what's a response to it? It feels insurmountable. So yeah, there's so much in me that's like, okay, God's still in control, but even though that feels very familiar in my body, I think as I've done work, and it also doesn't like no, no, something in me is saying, no, no, no, that's not, can't just kind of in a Christian coded scripture, coded way, settle and be okay with what is happening, even though I don't know what to do in a lot of ways, in the midst of that tension, I'm not settled, and I'm not that old pad answer, padded answer of, yeah, God's in control. Everything is going to be okay. Everything works for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.(11:13):It's not settling me,Speaker 1 (11:16):Right? Because it's not the same scripture if you're white as if you're black or brown or that's true, that scripture means very different things. If you're from white majority power and you say that scripture, you might have the finances and whatnot to deal with coming or the access to education, for instance. But if you're brown, you actually have to give up access to resources that can help your family, like literal, physical, pragmatic resources and be asked to be okay with that for that verse. That's a very different theology than for two sets of people.Speaker 2 (11:53):And it's why as I'm sitting with my clients and the work I do as a therapist, often it is the black and brown clients who are not, they haven't been able to digest this and just move on. It still, it's right here. This is the reality that we're in the middle of, and that is coming, and it is so much easier as a white person to just call on that verse, call on that scriptural ideal because we're not being cost things that those with less privilege are. AndSpeaker 1 (12:44):At the same time, what does it ask you? I can think of some examples for me, but for you in your location, what does this movement ask you to normalize or to make? Okay. Can you name specific things or general things that you can thinkSpeaker 2 (13:03):The movement of the election outcome and what's coming? What's happening?Speaker 3 (13:08):Yeah,Speaker 2 (13:15):That's a great question. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is just kind of going back to this concept that it's really hard to put words to, let me think for a second. So I think going back to answer this is exposing, right? Because it forces me to go back to the comfortable way that I used to view the world. I do think that that is having grown up in a hyper conservative evangelical world that's very red. There were certain ways that I had to tamp down any dissonance that I felt and being super faith oriented that often included a faith perspective. And so, yeah, I think some of the concepts or the ideas that I don't adhere to anymore, and that I was, Danielle, this is so hard to put words to this idea that there's I privilege and suffering. That sounds so gross, but I think there's so many mental gymnastics, even if I'm trying to articulate it, it's really hard because I might look at somebody less privileged than me in those days and think, well, they've got to work harder, but that's part of what they're being gifted. But at the same time, I would say that and hold that while being, not viewing myself that same way because I didn't, wasn't experiencing that lack of privilege that would've required me to work harder, to move forward, to be empowered, to change my outcome. So I don't know that I'm putting good words to what I'm feeling and thinking, butSpeaker 1 (16:14):I think I'm even thinking of, of how it's asked me to normalize that women don't need consent even for sex. It's not only that this was normalized through the president, but it was normalized through, it's been further reinforced through his cabinet picks. And this idea that it almost feels like to me, and I don't know if this is what it's intended to do, but the impact it's having on me is like, look at all the perpetrators I can nominate. And there's no consequence for that. This is okay, people are still shouting, this is God's will. This is God's will.Speaker 3 (17:07):Yeah.Speaker 2 (17:13):Yeah. I mean, as you're naming that, I can see your activation and I feel it too, right? It's going back to that and incredible powerlessness.Speaker 1 (17:39):And then the idea that somehow believing in Jesus is you can believe in Jesus and someone who commits rape or I sexual assault or abuse or human trafficking, that is a get out of jail free card. They can still be the leader. They can still be in charge, which from my experience is the truth in churches.Speaker 2 (18:12):It brings up the question in me, what are we doing? What is happening internally for us to make those jumps? And when I say us, I mean the people that would, and I years ago would've found myself in that camp, what was happening internally that could be so blatantly shown, and yet I'm going to put all my eggs in that basket regardless, because somehow that still can align with a mission of love and care and welcome and hope. I find the psychological mechanism there, which is rooted in a lot of what we know, white supremacy, patriarch, we know some of that, but just that the dissonance that has to be either just cut off from consciousness or somehow jumped over it is really interesting to me.Speaker 1 (19:26):Can you speak to that from a psychological standpoint, maybe in general terms, when you're in an abusive situation, what is that process like? Because what we're kind of describing, right?Speaker 2 (19:37):Yeah. It's so true. Yeah. Well, I mean, if in a harmful relationship and I'm under threat, and that threat can look a lot of different ways. It could be a sense of physical harm, emotional harm, sexual harm, spiritual harm, whatever that threat level is, it's going to activate nervous system responses in me that are good and are there to try to keep me safe. But that might include the typical fight flight, or it could include freeze or fawn, which all again, are good responses that our brain goes to try to keep us safe, but it requires certain parts of our brain to activate and other parts of our brain to not have quite so much energy put toward them. So my ability to think clearly and logically about what's happening is going to be much lower if I'm in a harmful situation, especially if this is repeated and we're talking about a relationship, this relationship not only includes harm, but also includes something good, which most harmful abusive relationships do. So yeah, psychologically, we're just not functioning on all levels if there's a threat of harm.(21:12):So I guess to your point, some of, and maybe not much of what is happening and people who I think truly, I don't know, I want to say that there are people who truly value the teachings of Jesus and want their life to be about him, and yet our things aren't functioning the way they should, not thinking clearly about what's happening. And they're such a dissociated kind of numbness too, which I think is a response that comes when we're being threatened. But I also think that then there is a commitment to it, a commitment to look away, a commitment to, in our privilege, just turn away from what we might in moments of safety, have questions about or see issues with. We can just, oh, I'll just look the other way. So I don't know if that gets at what you were asking, but feels multifaceted. It feels like there's kind of the response part, but then there's also a decision made.Speaker 1 (22:43):I think about that when we're in a position where we don't have power to make the choice we need to get out of it. Say we're a child and we're with an adult or in a job and maybe we need the job for money and we have an abusive employer, or maybe we're in a church system and we are under a threat of losing community or maybe access to work or resources. That pattern, I think of where you have to attach, maintain contact with the person that can hurt you to access some of those good things we're talking about. And at the same time, you have to detach in one of the ways you're talking about. You go into that learned trauma response from the harm that's also coming at you. So you almost have to split that off from the good things like the good and the bad things get split. If that happens over a long period of time, you become accustomed to doing that with maybe certain types of harm, for instance. And so I think about it, even in our bodies, some people drink scalding hot water or scalding hot cotton. Not saying it's wrong, but over time, your taste buds get numbed to that. You can numb out those initial burn sensations.(24:01):And so I think of that when I think of spiritual abuse or when our politics gets mixed up with normalizing, misogynistic and sexually abusive behaviors when we're elevating people that engage in these kinds of harms and saying, well, that's going to be okay for them, actually, let's give them more power. That's way if those are systems you're coming out of where abuse has been normalized or you've been told like, Hey, just follow, don't pay attention to your senses or your gut or your body, then by the time it gets here, you're going to be asking a lot less questions. You're not going to have the warning signals maybe going off. Yeah,Speaker 2 (24:45):Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. And even going back to when you were naming what's Asked, what you're being asked to normalize that women don't get to have consent for sex or they can be mistreated and sexually harmed, and it doesn't really matter, even as you were naming that, I could feel in me that learned trauma response is still there in some ways of when I see these reports of cabinet members and all the stuff that's coming out that people are saying, there's still something in me that's just like, oh, yeah, of course. No big deal. That doesn't stick. And that is not where I end, but there is an initial response in me that is not surprised, that even thinks Well, of course. And it's not a position of That's okay. Yeah, it's really interesting. It's hard to put words to, but it is not as alarming as it should be at times.Speaker 1 (26:03):I think it's good to talk it out, even though it finds both of us without words, because how often are we able to have a conversation like this where we actually be wordless and someone can just talk with us?Speaker 3 (26:16):That's true.Speaker 1 (26:17):Majority of our lives, we have to spend working or taking care of others or surviving making food. I think that's probably why I wanted to just have a conversation like this, because it's not like it's just going to free flow. We're talking about statistics in a sport. It's not the same thing.Speaker 2 (26:35):Yeah, it's very true. And every piece is so interwoven, I think, for me, with my own story and things on a personal level, and then moving out the systemic levels of family and church and then bigger systems. So it does feel hard to put words to, but it is really, I think it is very worthwhile to stumble around and try to find words.Speaker 1 (27:14):Yeah, I mean, you and me we're not experts.Speaker 2 (27:17):No, nope.Speaker 1 (27:22):I was so glad you said personal story because there were things I thought like, oh, this is resolved. I am cool with this. And then it was the day after the election, and I found myself sitting in silence for just a long periods of time about anything to say. I didn't really have a clear thought, likeSpeaker 2 (27:41):A hundred percent. I mean, I think even, I haven't had a ton of conversations about it, honestly. I've kind of sat with folks as they've processed, but I have not taken a lot of space to process. And I think for at least a good week, I didn't have, there was really no way to put words to what my inner experience was. There was a lot of tears and a lot of silence and a lot of dread. But just this feeling of, if I even try to put words, I don't have words for this right now. And yeah,Speaker 1 (28:29):I think that's So partly is the, so insidiousness of spirituality that relies on power to be enforced is that it can tap into all those other tender places in us.Speaker 2 (28:55):Yeah. I mean, yes, it just feels like such a bind and so hard to locate. I think for me, I've got my own spiritual stuff like shifting and have been processing stories of spiritual harm, and I'm still in the midst of that. So that was already there, and then you add this layer on top of that, and it just feels really hard to even have the comforting personal spirituality to anchor to in the midst of all this powerlessness and not comforting in a numbed out split off way of everything's going to be fine, but I can anchor to a creator. I can anchor to a savior. I can anchor to something bigger than me that feels even hard to access.Speaker 1 (30:06):I was thinking about that. I was on Instagram and my family follows some hyper conservative podcasters. So I was watching, I look at that just to get an idea, what are other people thinking? And they were glory to God and Jesus answer by prayer. And I was wondering back in Nazi Germany who voted for Hitler and who had those same prayers and who had those same answers or colonists that came to the United States and raped and murdered and pillaged, and they felt like, oh, wow. God did this for me. I just felt like, wow. We literally think nothing alike. Yeah,Speaker 2 (30:55):And it's hard when you've got folks like that in your family. What commonality are we even standing on anymore? And maybe there's not any,Speaker 1 (31:12):I like to think that the commonality, I tell myself the commonality is that we both believe we're human and the humanity is shared between us, but I'm always not so sure about that if I believe we're both human. Do you actually believe that? I'm unsure,Speaker 2 (31:30):Right? Well, yeah, because I think that belief in our humanity has to require that, that we believe in another's humanity, right? That the dignity of another, and that feels far away. I am not sure how much access people, yeah, it's hard. I don't know the right words to use there, but I don't know how common that is right now.Speaker 1 (32:12):What do you do to find grounding for yourself or to comfort maybe in general or if you have any specifics?Speaker 2 (32:22):That's a good question. I think it's hard right now. I think I'm noticing how I am noticing the lack of grounding. I'm noticing how hard it is to be still, how hard it is to just relax, how hard it is to sit in silence, how hard it is not to grab my phone or eat or those are the things right now, that quick comfort, dopamine boost that I'm turning to. I think it is really, I don't think right now I've figured it out. I mean, I try to move my body every day. I think that is not stillness, but that is a grounded moment for me. And I think when I noticed, honestly in these days, for me, when the emotion has space to come up, letting it come up and not having all the words for it, but being in touch with my tears and in touch with the feeling of powerlessness feels grounded.Speaker 1 (33:44):So the feeling of powerlessness, being in touch with that feels grounding to you?Speaker 2 (33:49):Yeah.Speaker 1 (33:50):Can you say any more about that?Speaker 2 (33:53):Well, it feels real, right? It feels real. It feels real. It feels like in that moment, I'm not trying to numb it. I'm not trying to escape it. I'm not trying. I'm in a complex of like, oh, I can fix this somehow. And I think knowing that, even in those moments, I mean, those are very solitary moments for me. There's not a communal, that's not communal experience for me. But I think in those moments, there is something in me that knows I'm not the only one that's feeling that, and that feels grounding. I think what I've encouraged my clients to do who are reckoning with the fear terror, really disappointed feelings, all that they're coming out of the election with, I've encouraged them. Do you have folks who feel the same that you can just be with in this moment? Can we have community in the powerlessness? Not to stay there, but I do think our humanity has, for those of us who believe in the dignity, us and others around us as humans, we've taken a toll. Our bodies have taken a toll through this, and we need to know that in the midst of this powerlessness, we're not the only ones feeling it, that it feels like a moment of we've got to have other people around us to keep moving and respond, however that looks.(35:41):How about you?Speaker 1 (35:46):I think for me, every morning, just very, it might seem little, but every morning I've been going to the waterfront out here and taking pictures of the same scene, just, I can't even call it a sunrise because pre 7:00 AM it's like dark, dark, dark here in the winter, like dark, dark, dark at 4:00 PM I know it sounds silly, but I've been doing it. It just feels good. Just like, what does that look like? What does it like for me? What do I notice? It always seems to shift a tiny bit, and I like that. Otherwise, I'll text a friend or say, my day is shit, or This really good thing happened. I don't need anybody to make anything better for me because they really can't. But I just want someone to know so I'm not alone.Speaker 3 (36:32):Yeah.Speaker 2 (36:35):Yeah. Good. I like the thought of anchoring to nature, and there's something, I think for me, in the tender places of my own spirituality, being in nature, I can feel the closest to that, the closest to God, the closest to something of hope, something of, and I hope that's real, or at least I hope that it's real. I hope that it's real. You know what I mean? I hope that's not cheap. I like that.Speaker 1 (37:24):I like how you don't have to prove it, man. I hope that's it.Speaker 3 (37:29):Yeah.Speaker 1 (37:32):It feels like the opposite of that's been what's happening to us. Someone's trying to prove it to us.Speaker 2 (37:42):Yeah. How have you handled for you, what have you noticed in terms of taking in news updates? Do you keep yourself pretty open and pretty constantly accessing those things, or have you noticed the need to pause? How's that played out for you?Speaker 1 (38:03):Yeah. Over the weekend, I took a break. It just kind of thought about fun and good things, and I saw a lot of news stories flash across that I was interested in, but I was like, man, I'm not going to read that. That's not going to feel good. But prior to the election, I felt like I remember having this feeling in the last presidency of Trump that every day something bad happened or that every day something happened that I didn't know what to expect. And I think once he's in office, just let the bad things happen so I can know what it is. But right now, I don't know. And there's a lot of talking, but we don't know what's going to happen. So I'm trying to stay a little bit less engaged now because I am trying to stay informed on the things I need to stay informed on, but less engaged in that way. What about you?Speaker 2 (39:01):Yeah. It is funny, as you mentioned that his last presidency, what you felt, I remember feeling a palpable sense of relief when Biden came into office because it was like, I think I felt the same thing you felt without putting those words around it. It was just this constant, every day there was something else. Every day there was some shock or ugh. So whether that was realistic or not, I felt relief when he wasn't in office anymore, which took some time. But yeah, I feel that tension too of, well, I want to be informed, but also there is a lot of unknown. There is a lot of kind of talk that's not able to come into fruition yet, and it feels like, for me, it drives my anxiety, it drives my dread. So holding that tension of being informed, but not staying so connected to all the possibilities that I'm unwell and not able to do my job or love my kids or those things. Yeah.Speaker 1 (40:17):Yeah. Right.Speaker 2 (40:20):Yeah. I mean, there's so much weight. I think as we're just in our conversation, there's so much weight in my body, so much weight in my stomach, so much tightness in my throat. It's such a, there's so much dread,Speaker 3 (40:40):Right?Speaker 1 (40:42):Yeah. And I think that's, that's the thing that's different that I think it's good for us to keep naming. This isn't like PTSD where the trauma happened and it's in the past. This is an ongoing thing that hasn't stopped yet. So I think at the same time, it's ongoing. We'll often have these traumatic symptoms that we might call PTSD, but for us to expect ourselves or you or I expect someone else to just be over it, I don't think that's necessarily fair.Speaker 2 (41:22):Yeah. And I think in the midst of that, trying to be kind with ourselves and gentle, acknowledging what we are in the midst of and tending to our bodies and giving ourselves a pass and moments when we need to eat a good meal and just talk about whatever it is with a friend or with our families holding onto our humanity and our dignity in that way too. Those really important.Speaker 1 (42:07):Well, are there any final thoughts you want to leave folks with? I mean, I know we can't wrap this up. I know we'll likely have more conversations, but this is kind of our opening. Any final thoughts?Speaker 2 (42:23):I mean, I think just that encouragement, speaking to myself too, of being kind, being kind to ourselves, but also to other people. Not being okay with injustice, but remembering the humanity and even, I don't know, it feels hard to do, but remembering somebody's humanity, even if they're not honoring mine, the kind of person I want to be. That's hard. But I do think that that feels really important.Speaker 1 (43:09):That feels good. I think for me, I try to, like I said, find some grounding in myself and then find some folks that I can just be myself with, even just one person for the day that I can express one real emotion with one real thought, even if it's joy or happiness, but someone I know that will celebrate that with me. Or if I'm sad, someone I know I can actually cry with or just tell it, like say I'm sad today. Yeah.Speaker 3 (43:44):Yeah.Speaker 1 (43:46):Well, thank you for joining me. So good to be here on Monday, December 9th, just a week from now, Jenny McGrath of Indwell Counseling, and I link is in the notes, are going to be doing a little workshop, like one-off thing on Christian nationalism and spiritual abuse. If you're confused about what's going on in the us you feel triggered about past spiritual abuse, when you see certain elected officials and faith officials using harmful rhetoric, or are you wanting to understanding and tools to navigate this present moment, you're not alone. As you heard in our conversation. It can be very difficult. And so we just decided, hey, we'd offer this little workshop, talk a little bit about it. And then in early 2025, Jenny and I are going to be getting some groups for individuals who want to process and grieve and learn more about spiritual abuse and its various intersections with race. This is not new work for Jenny and I. We've been having this conversation for many years now, and we're also not experts. We're not here to solve all the problems or be the only resource for you, but you're invited to join. If cost is a problem, please reach out. We'll see what we can do.    Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

https://www.philallenjr.comPhil is a man driven by vision, compelled to fulfill God's calling on his life. His passion is not only to see individuals come to know and grow in a relationship with Jesus, but to see social transformation that includes addressing systems and structures that affect the everyday lives of people, especially those typically pushed to the margins because of oppression, injustices, and inequities grounded in race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and any part of their being that does not fit the dominant group membership.As an All-American high school basketball player, Phil attended North Carolina A&T University to play basketball and study architectural engineering. Upon his call to ministry years later, he went on to receive his Bachelors in Theological Studies, with an emphasis in Christian Ministries from The King's University. While working as a full-time lead pastor of Own Your Faith Ministries (Santa Clarita, CA), Phil completed a Master of Arts in Theology degree from Fuller Theological Seminary, studying Christian Ethics. As a current PhD candidate in Christian Ethics, with a minor in Theology and Culture, his research involves race theory, theology, ethics, culture, and the theology and ethics of Martin Luther King, Jr.He is founder of the non-profit organization Racial Solidarity Project based in Los Angeles, CA. His passion for dialogue, resistance, and solutions to the problem of systemic racism was fostered by his family and personal life experiences as well as his educational journey. Phil was recently named a Pannell Center for Black Church Studies Fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary. As a fellow his research on Black Church theology, liturgy, and ethics further undergirds his own ethics of justice, healing racial trauma, and racial solidarity. He has taught undergraduate classes on biblical ethics toward racial solidarity. His fields of interest include Christian ethics, Black Church studies, race theory, pneumatology, theology of justice and theology of play and sport.When he isn't pastoring, studying, or writing, Phil enjoys running, bowling, basketball, and just watching his favorite television shows. As an all-around creative, he is an author, a teacher, pastor, filmmaker (see his documentary Open Wounds), but first a poet. His diverse experiences and interests have gifted him with the ability to relate to and inspire just about anyone he meets.He is the author of two books, Open Wounds: A Story of Racial Tragedy, Trauma, and Redemption (Fortress Press, 2021) and The Prophetic Lens: The Camera and Black Moral Agency From MLK to Darnella Frazier (Fortress Press, 2022).Speaker 1 (00:13):Welcome to the Arise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and the church. And tune in and listen to this conversation today. Dr. Phil Allen, Jr and myself are going to have a conversation today. And if you go to his website, phil allen jr.com, you can see that his quote is Justice Matters, my neighbors Matter, creation matters, faith Matters. And really in this conversation, I want you to pay attention to those points that he makes in this quote from his website and how that filters through in the research he does in the point of view he's bringing to the table for this conversation on what are we doing? And I think a lot of people are like, are we still talking about the Yes, we're still talking about it. Yes. It's still relevant and we're talking about it because from understanding creates pathways towards action, towards organizing, towards being together with one another in community so that we can support justice, so that we can support our neighbors so that we have faith in creator. And so I want to encourage you to listen through that lens. Go find his website, phil allen jr.com. Look up this amazing man, this professor, he's got a podcast, he's got books, poetry speaking, a documentary. Don't hesitate to reach out, but as you listen, focusing on justice Neighbor and creation and Faith.(01:48):Yeah. What has it been like for you since the election? Or what's that been likeSpeaker 2 (01:57):Since the election? The first couple of days were, I was a bit numb. I was very disappointed in 2016. I wasn't surprised. I had this feeling that he was going to win, even though people thought Hillary would win. I just didn't have the confidence in those battleground swing state. I thought he represented something that a lot of people in this country are drawn to. And this year I really felt like she was going to win. Vice President Harris was going to win because of the coalition, because of the momentum. People can critique and criticize her campaign, but there's nothing orthodox about starting a hundred days before. And I think what they did was calculated. I won't say perfect, but it was good. It was a solid campaign given what she had to work with. And I really thought she would win. And I was just extremely disappointed. It was like this heaviness over me, but then after day two, things started to feel a little bit lighter. I just put things in perspective. I wasn't going to sulk and sit in some sadness because this man won. I think I was more disappointed in the people like what is our standard, particularly Christians, conservative Christians, what is the standard now? How low is the bar?(04:04):And honestly, I don't know if there's anyone else on the planet, any other demographic that could have done that with 34 felonies saying the things that he says about people of color, about women, about veterans. I mean, he just literally does not care. There's no man or woman of color. There's no woman, there's no one else that could do that. And people would ignore everything, do theological gymnastics and to justify everything and still vote for 'em. No one else could pull it off. And I think for me, it just solidified the type of country we live in. So I'm good now, as good as I can be. I can't change it, so I'm not going to sulk and be sad. I'm going to continue to do the work that God has called me to do and continue to chat, put a video out. I think you may have seen it on social media just to put my thoughts out there, put words to my feelings and just move forward. Yep.Speaker 1 (05:24):When you think about, is it okay if I ask you a couple of questions?Speaker 3 (05:28):Yeah.Speaker 1 (05:29):When you think about your research and completing your PhD and the theory and work and the evidence and structures you uncovered in that research, then how does that continue to frame your outlook for where we are today? ItSpeaker 2 (05:52):Couldn't, this election was interesting. This election confirmed for me, my research,Speaker 1 (05:59):Yes.Speaker 2 (06:02):I'll give you one part of it. In my research I talk about the plantation complex and it's made up of three major categories and there are subcategories under each one, organizing properties, modes of power, and operating practices. Three major categories Under organizing properties, there are four properties I list. I'm not saying it's an exhaustive list. Someone else might come in and want to tweak it and change it. That's fine. What I came up with is for vision covenant, spatial arrangement and epistemology, and specifically theological scientific epistemology, specifically white racial covenant. For those two, those are the specific terms I use. And to me, vice President Harris asked a question, this is about what kind of country do we want? That's a statement about what kind of vision do you have? Would you like to see this country embody? So vision is always there. We're always talking about, we're always casting vision when we tell stories, when we talk about how we want the, whether it's the education system, immigration, whatever. We're casting a vision, but what do we want to see? And then that ends up driving so much of what weSpeaker 3 (07:45):Do.Speaker 2 (07:48):We have the vision now of this is what America wants.Speaker 1 (07:52):Yes,Speaker 2 (07:54):They want this man with all, he's not just a flawed human being, in my opinion. He's a vile human being. She also is not a perfect candidate. She's a decent woman. She's a decent person. Two vastly different visions for this country. Then you talk about spatial arrangement. Electoral college is about spatial arrangement. You have your blue states, your red states, but everything comes down to five or six. Sometimes one state decides the election, and it all depends on who's living in that state, how are the districts redrawn. All types of stuff can play out. But to me, I saw that going on and then I saw white racial covenant play out. You look at who voted for who, percentage wise, and I kept seeing this allegiance, this covenant with Donald Trump, and there had to have been independents and even some Democrats that voted for him to have voted at such a high clip when his base is only 37%, 40% at most, and a Republican party is half. And he gets, I don't know. I just started to see those things play out. And from my dissertation, just those four categories, the stuff that we don't even pay attention to, they shape society, vision, spatial arrangement, covenant whose allegiance, who has your allegiance, because that drives decision making that drives what you value. It influences what you value. And epistemology, theological, scientific epistemology, he's the chosen one.(10:03):God chose him for such a time as the, I keep hearing this language. So they're using theological language to justify everything about this man. So yeah.Speaker 1 (10:18):Yeah.Speaker 2 (10:19):It's hard for me not to see through that lens. Now that I spent six years researching it, it's hard for me not to see through those lenses the lens of power, how power is operating, what type of power is operating and the practices and all that stuff.Speaker 1 (10:38):There's so much you said that I know we could jump into. Particularly when you talk about the white racial covenant. I was struck at, there's intersection between our research areas, and I was thinking about in grad school before I even got into my post-grad research, I wrote about three things for the Latinx Latino community that kind of inform the way white supremacy has infiltrated our lives. One is silence, one is compliance, and then lastly is erasure. And as we saw the swing, and they've talked ad nauseum about Latinos when we are a minimal part of the electoral vote, but they've talked ad nauseum about the movement specifically of men. But when you think of the demand to be silent over centuries, the demand to comply, and then the sense that maybe I can erase myself and what can I trade in for the good graces to get into the good graces of white racial identity and vote against my own best interests, vote against protecting my community, vote against even maybe even protecting my grandma or my kid that's on daca, et cetera. What was the cost? And as you were explaining that, I was seeing it through that lens that you were describing.Speaker 2 (12:17):Yep, yep. What's interesting is one of the practices, I talk about tokenization on the plantation or some would say tokenism, and there's always white racial covenant is not just among white people.(12:42):It's anyone from any group, including my community. Those who want, they want to be in closer proximity to whiteness. They want to be accepted into the white way of being. And when I say whiteness, you understand what I'm saying? I'm not just talking about white persons or white ethnicity. We're talking about a way of being in the world, a lens through which you see the world and move in that. And you can be a person of color and totally embrace whiteness, internalize that it only takes a few to then that's an effort to legitimize it, to legitimize. See, look at those. Look at that black guy or that Latino seed. They get it, and it further legitimizes that worldview.Speaker 1 (13:38):Yeah. I know for me, I felt so deeply, I don't think disappointment is the right word, but maybe I felt betrayed, but also I felt deeply, I just felt the weight of what centuries have done. And then I think it was like a Sunday afternoon where he's in Madison Square Garden using the most vile of comments, the most vile of comments to degrade our race, our ethnicity, where we come from, and then to turn around and garner a vote. I mean, it fits into your theory.Speaker 2 (14:26):So think about what he said when he first ran in 2016. I can stand on Fifth Avenue in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I won't lose any votes. Now, fast forward to 2024 in Madison Square Garden, the lineup, the things he said, he didn't condemn anything. He invites white supremacists into his home for dinner. He welcomes them. He literally does not care because he understands the allegiance, not just from his base, but even those adjacent to his base. And that's why I keep saying, how low is this bar that you can have those people? Because everyone thought, oh, this is it. That just killed it for 'em. It did not matter. No, it did not matter. Some of it is, I think based on race, and some of it is based on gender. Some of it's a combination of both. And that's why I said in my video, she didn't stand a chance anytime people kept saying, we need to hear more and I need to get to know her more. Well, what are you watching?Speaker 3 (15:47):WhatSpeaker 2 (15:47):Else do you need to know? She's told her whole story over and over again. She's literally laid out bullet point, what she wants to do. What else is there half the people who say that don't even understand these concepts anyway?Speaker 3 (16:04):Yeah,Speaker 2 (16:05):They don't understand it. They're not understand this stuff.Speaker 1 (16:11):I guess what you say, really, it triggered something in my mind and see what you do with it. He stood in Madison Square Garden, and I actually wonder now, looking at it with the lens of a tiny bit of space that maybe if even that was riveting for people, even some of the adjacent people of color that voted for him, because it's riveting that someone could have that much power and get away with it and move in the world without consequence. And I think a lot of people are looking for that sort of autonomy or freedom to move or it's appealing. The power of it is appealing in a way that I didn't think about it before you said it, and I don't know that that's it, but I get curious about it because it definitely didn't take any votes away.Speaker 2 (17:09):And I'm glad you used the word curious because we're just theorizing right now, sharing opinions how we feel. And so I'm curious as well about a lot of these things. I'm just at a loss for words. I don't even know how to wrap my mind around that. I do think is an appeal though. I do think there is in my dissertation that the type of power that I talk about is autocratic ideological power where the ideology, it's not a person, the autonomous sovereign power. And I borrowed from Fuko, so I'm using a little bit of fuko, Michelle Fuko, and he uses the term sovereign power like king, a dictator, Vladimir Putin type of person. And I'm saying, don't have a king. And it's not one person with that type of autonomy, but there's an ideology that has that type of autonomy and we can add appeal, and it's the ideology of white supremacy. And it's almost like, well, he should be able to get away with that subconsciously. Not saying that people are saying that consciously, but it's almost like it's normalized like he should because had she said any of those things, oh, she shouldn't say those things. How dare she?(18:44):Or if Obama, when Obama said they clinging to their guns and their religion, they wanted to crucify. He shouldn't say those things. How dare he? But Trump can say, grab him by the lose no votes,Speaker 1 (19:04):Right?Speaker 2 (19:06):I don't like some of the things that he says. I wish he would tone down some of the things that he says, but so there's an autonomy. So where is it? Is it in him or is it in the ideology that he embodies? And it's appealing because so many people can share in that on different levels. So the idea is that if you go back to the plantation, every white person had some level of power over a black body and immunity, unless they got in trouble with a slave owner for killing or damagingSpeaker 1 (19:45):Property.Speaker 2 (19:47):But every person on every level shared to varying degrees in this autocracy of ideology, autocracy of white supremacy, same thing is happening today. So he can say it, the comedian can say it, congressmen and women can say it, Marjorie till green can say whatever she wants. Gates can say, I mean, these people can say whatever they want, especially if they're in closer proximity to him because he is the ultimate right now, the ultimate embodiment of the superiority of whiteness. And so there is this subconscious, I think, appeal to that. How we are drawn to the bad guy in the film. We're drawn to the villain in the wrestling match. We just kind of drawn to them a bit. There's an appeal to that type of power and to get away with it. So I like that word appeal to it,Speaker 1 (21:04):Man. I mean, I started getting really scared as you were talking because this power and this appeal and the way you're describing it, well, how did you say it? The ideology or is, what did you call it? Autonomous powerSpeaker 2 (21:27):Autocratic. Ideological power.Speaker 1 (21:29):Autocratic. Ideological power isn't just one person. It's embodied in this feeling. And that I think fits with the way I'm thinking. I got scared as you were talking because it's been hyper-focused on immigration and on a certain group of people so you can gain proximity to power. And I kind of wonder how is that going to play out? How will people play that out in their imaginations or in their communities is like what gets them closer to that power? Especially if, I mean, we could debate on tariffs and all that stuff, but no one I'm hearing from is telling me that tariffs are going to bring down the cost of goods. I've heard that nowhere. So then what are you going to do if you feel more hopeless and you're part of that working, let's say white or white adjacent class, where will you focus your energy? What can you control? So I think as you were talking, I started getting scared. I was like, this is a dangerous thing.Speaker 2 (22:34):So here's what I've told someone. Sadly, the only person who could have beaten Trump in 2020 was Joe Biden, a white man. A white woman wouldn't have been able to do it. Black woman, black man, Latino, Asian. It took a white man because people still needs to be, they needed to vote against him. They needed to see themselves. That's the majority of the country. They need to see themselves. Biden wasn't the best candidate by far. No, but he was the only one who could beatSpeaker 1 (23:16):Trump.Speaker 2 (23:17):Now, he wasn't going to win this election, even though Trump has shown signs over the last year or so of aging, doesn't matter. He's loud and boisterous. So he gets a little bit of a pass. But guess what? If that hopelessness sets in the left, the Democrats are going to have to present another white man. You're not going to beat the part. You're not going to win the next election with someone other than a white man to beat this. He is the embodiment. He is the golden calf. You need at least a beige calf. You're not going to win the next election with with someone that looks like me or you, or its going to be, that's the sad part. So with that hopelessness, if they feel that and they feel like, okay, it is been the last four years has not been what he's promised, you're going to have to present them with an alternative that's still adjacent, at least in aesthetics, optics. And then you might, after that, if everything is going well, now someone can come off of that. This is the unfortunate reality. Biden is the only one that was going to be able to beat him in 2020, and I think it's going to take the same thing in 2020. It's definitely going to take a man because he's got the movement, the masculine movement. He's brought that up to serve. It's going to take a man to do it. Unfortunately, a woman may not be able to push back against that, but I think it's going to have to take a white man.Speaker 1 (25:08):Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think another female can win against him. There's no waySpeaker 2 (25:15):He embodies the ideology of white in his posture, his tone, his rhetoric, his height, everything about him embodies, if you look at the history in this country of whiteness is the physical manifestation of it. And I'm not the only one that has said that.Speaker 1 (25:37):No,Speaker 2 (25:39):He is not just a physical manifestation. He is, at least in this era, he is the manifestation of it. He is the embodiment of it, attitude and everything.Speaker 1 (25:59):Yeah, I guess you just find me silent because I believe you. It's true. There's no doubt in my mind. And it's also stunning that this is where we're at, that people, again, I mean to fall back on what you've researched, people chose the plantation owner,Speaker 2 (26:31):And many people who do don't see themselves in the position of the enslaved,Speaker 1 (26:39):No,Speaker 2 (26:39):They see themselves as benefiting from or having favor from the plantation owner. They're either the overseer or the driver, or they're one of the family members or guests on the plantation. But no one's going to willingly choose a system that they don't benefit from. So they believe they will benefit from this, or they're willing to accept some treatment for the promise of prosperity. That's the other issue that we have. People see this. They see the world through an economic lens only. For me, I got to look at the world through a moral lens, an ethical lens. That's how I'm trained, but that's just how I've always been. Because if I look at it through an economic lens, I'll put up with anything, as long as you can put money in my pocket, you can call me the N word. If that's my, you can probably call me the N word. As long as you put money in my pocket, I'll tolerate it. And that's unfortunately how people see, again, when people talk about the economy, how many people understand economics,Speaker 1 (27:53):Honestly, whatSpeaker 2 (27:54):Percentage they do understand how much it's costing me to pay these groceries. What they don't understand is the why underneath all that, because I think they did one thing they could have done better. The Democrats is explain to people corporate greed. The cost of living is always going up. It may drop a little bit, but it's always doing this.Speaker 1 (28:29):But Phil, I would argue back with you that I don't think these people wanted to understand.Speaker 2 (28:35):You don't have to argue. I agree. ISpeaker 1 (28:38):Talked to some folks and I was like, dude, tariffs, your avocado's going to be $12. They mostly come from Mexico. How are you going to afford an avocado? And it's like, it didn'tSpeaker 2 (28:52):Matter. The golden calf.Speaker 1 (28:57):The golden calf, Elliot comes back. I mean, I want to work to make these people, in a sense, ignorant. I want to work to think of it like that, not because it benefits me, but maybe it does. To think that some people didn't vote with the ideas that we're talking about in mine, but they absolutely did.Speaker 2 (29:23):And I think you're dead on. It's a willingness or unwillingness to want to know. I'm just simply saying that many don't. You may see people interviewed on television or surveys, or even when you talk to people, I'm just simply saying they don't really understand. I got three degrees. I still need to read up and study and understand economics. That's not my field, right? So I'm still learning the nuances and complexities of that, but I'm a researcher by nature. Now most people aren't. So I'm just simply saying that they just don't know. They think they know, but they really don't. But a more accurate description of that is what you just said. Most people are unwilling to know. Because here's the thing, if you learn the truth about something or the facts about something, now you're forced to have to make a decision you might not want to make.Speaker 1 (30:28):Exactly. That's exactly right. Yep.Speaker 2 (30:35):It's like wanting to ban books and erase history and rewrite history. Because if you really did, to this day, whether I'm teaching or having conversations, I share basic stuff, stuff about history. And there's so many people that I never knew that, and I knew this stuff when I was a kid. I never knew that. What are we learning? Is everything stem.Speaker 1 (31:11):When Trump referenced the operation under Eisenhower Wetback, operation Wetback, I knew about that. I had researched it after high school in college, and I knew at that point, part of the success of that project was that they were able to deport citizens and stem the tide of, they didn't want them having more kids or reproducing, so they got rid of entire families. That was very intentional. That's purposeful. And so when they talk about deporting criminals, well, there just aren't that many criminals to deport. But for the Latino to understand that they would have to give up the idea that they could become adjacent to that power structure and benefit.Speaker 2 (32:12):Absolutely.Speaker 1 (32:14):YouSpeaker 2 (32:14):Have to give up something.Speaker 1 (32:15):You have to give up something. And so they traded in their grandma, literally, that's what's going to happen.Speaker 2 (32:27):And so now there's a connection between the golden calf and fear. So not only is he the idol, but he has the rhetoric to tap the fear, the anxiety. And when you've been in majority for a few hundred years now, the idea of no longer being the majority in the country scares a lot of people. It doesn't scare people of color. We don't really think about it because we've always been the minority. And I don't think one group is going to be the majority, maybe the Latino community because of immigration one day, maybe, probably not in my lifetime, but most of us are used to being in the minority that scares the dominant group, the white group. I've had conversations within the church years ago where this anxiety, not just with Latinos, but Muslims,Speaker 1 (33:41):Yep, MuslimsSpeaker 2 (33:42):As well. This fear that they're having so many more babies than we are, and how they try to pull people of color who are Americans into this by saying they're trying to have more babies than Americans. So now they want us to also have this fear of the other. So you got the idol who has the rhetoric to tap into the sentiments,Speaker 1 (34:13):Right? Yeah. Sorry, keep going. No,Speaker 2 (34:15):Go on. Go, go.Speaker 1 (34:17):Well, I mean, it just brings up the whole idea of when he said, the migrants are taking the black jobs. I was like, what jobs are these? And the intent is only to divide us.Speaker 2 (34:31):Yes. So I've had conversations with some African-Americans who I know are not, I know these people. These are just random people. They're not as in tune with politics. They're just kind of speaking the taglines that they heard. And I said, what jobs are they taking? And they can't answer that. But it's the same thing that happened 400 years ago almost. When they created the very terms white and black. There was this revolt among poor whites and poor and enslaved black people, particularly in Virginia. And I'm thinking of Bacon's Rebellion and how do you defeat that coalition? You divide them, you find a way to divide them. How's that? They came up with the term 1670s. They came up with the term white and black, and they had a range, I think it was somewhat white, almost white. White, somewhat black, almost black, black. But they had the termed white and black. And if you were of European descent, you could now be considered a white person. And with that came privileges, or as WEB, the voice would say the wages of whiteness, theSpeaker 1 (35:55):WagesSpeaker 2 (35:55):Of you could own property. And if you own a certain amount of property, you could vote. You could be a citizen. You had freedom of mobility. If you were black, you were meant to be enslaved in perpetuity. So now the poor whites, even though they did not benefit from slavery,Speaker 3 (36:20):BecauseSpeaker 2 (36:22):The free enslaved Africans took the opportunities from poor whites who were able to work the land and earn some type of money, but now you've got free labor. So slavery actually hurt them. And the hierarchy, it hurt them. Wealthy white folks did not look well upon for white people. But why were they so had such allegiance? Because they had this identity, this membership into whiteness. And at least they weren't on the bottom.Speaker 1 (37:04):At least they weren't on the bottom. That's right.Speaker 2 (37:07):And so the same tactic is happening here is find a way to divide black and brown, divide black and Palestinian divide, because you knew black women were going to vote 90 plus percent. I thought black men would be 80 plus percent. Turns out they were 78, 70 9%. I thought black men would've been a little bit higher than that, but you knew black folks were going to vote in mass. But you find a way to divide and separate others from that coalition.Speaker 1 (37:53):Yeah. Well, here we are, Phil. What gives you, and I know we could talk about this for a long time. What are you operating on right now? I know you said you're not going to wallow in the sadness at the very beginning, but what is your organizing moment? What is your faith compelling you to do in this moment? How do you see the coming year?Speaker 2 (38:19):I am doubling down on my voice being more direct, being more the truth teller. I never want to lose truth with grace. I don't want to become the thing I disdain, but it is through my writing that I'm now doubling down and able to publish and put out what I believe is truth. It's factually based evidence-based. Some may call controversial, some may not. I don't know. But that's where I put my energy because I have more energy now to do that since I graduated, so I can invest more time, whether it's working on my next book, project op-Eds articles in the next year. So that's what I'm hoping to write. I'm hoping to take a lot of what I learned in the last six years and put it out there for the world. So it is just motivating me even more, whether it's poetry, academic stuff, teaching, and I've already been doing some of that. I just have the energy now to engage more.Speaker 1 (39:54):And sadly, you have more material to work with.Speaker 2 (39:57):Yeah, yeah, that'sSpeaker 1 (39:59):True. It's happening in real time. Yeah,Speaker 2 (40:03):Real time.Speaker 1 (40:05):Well, how can folks get ahold of you if they want to invite you to be part of their group or to come speak orSpeaker 2 (40:12):Easiest would be phil allen jr.com. And they can go to, and you can email me through there, social media on Instagram, Phil Allen Jr. PhD, Facebook at Phil Allen Jr. Not the author page, the personal page. I'm still trying to delete the author page, but for whatever reason, Facebook makes it very difficult to delete your own page.Speaker 1 (40:42):They do,Speaker 2 (40:44):But Phil Allen Jr. My personal page is on Facebook. Those are only two social media platforms I have other than threads. Phil Allen, Jr. PhD on Instagram and Threads, Phil Allen Jr. On Facebook, Phil Allen jr.com, and those are the ways to reach me.Speaker 1 (41:04):How can folks get ahold of the writing you've already done in your research and read more about what we've been talking about? How can they get ahold of what you've already done?Speaker 2 (41:15):So my first two books, open Wounds and the Prophetic Lens, you can get 'em on Amazon, would love it if you could purchase a copy and after you've read, even if you read some of it and you felt led to leave a review, that helps. I'm currently revising my dissertation so that it's more accessible, so I'm changing, you get it, the academic language, that's not my true voice. So I'm trying to revise that so I can speak and sound more like me, which is more of a poetic voice. So I want to write in that sweet spot where it's still respected and used in academic spaces, but it's more accessible to people beyond academia who are interested in the subject matter. So that hopefully, I've been shopping it to publishers and I'm still shopping. So hopefully, if not next fall, hopefully by early 2026, that book can be published.Speaker 3 (42:21):Okay.Speaker 2 (42:24):The dissertation, you can go to ProQuest and you can type in my name Phil Allen Jr. You can type in the plantation complex.Speaker 3 (42:35):Okay.Speaker 2 (42:36):No, not the Plantation Complex America. The PlantationSpeaker 1 (42:41):America, the Plantation.Speaker 2 (42:43):That's the title. And it's on proquest.com. That's where dissertations are published. So right now, it may cost something to read it, to get ahold of it, but you can look for it there until we revise and rewrite and publish the book.Speaker 1 (43:01):I'm really looking forward to, I haven't read your dissertation, but I want to, and I'm really looking forward to reading that book that's coming out.Speaker 2 (43:09):Thank you. Yes. And my YouTube channel, I don't really talk much. You can just type in my name, Phil Allen, Jr. There's quite a few spoken word videos, some old sermons I on there as well.Speaker 1 (43:25):Okay. Thank you, Phil.Speaker 2 (43:29):Lemme stop. Thank you.Speaker 1 (43:32):Thank you for joining us today, and I'm just honored to be in conversation with folks that are on this journey. We are not alone. If you need other kinds of resources, please don't hesitate to look up in our notes, some of the resources we listed in previous episodes, and also take good care of your bodies. Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Trigger Warning: Proceed only if you are comfortable with potentially sensitive topics.This is not psychological advice, service, or prescriptive treatment for anxiety or depression. The content related to descriptions of depression, anxiety, or despair may be upsetting or triggering, but are clearly not exhaustive. If you should feel symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, please seek professional mental health services, or contact (in Kitsap County) Kitsap Mobile Crisis Team at  1-888-910-0416. The line is staffed by professionals who are trained to determine the level of crisis services needed. Depending on the need, this may include dispatching the KMHS Mobile Crisis Outreach Team for emergency assessment. In the Words and Voice of Rebecca W. Walston:Anticipatory intelligence  is a phrase that I heard at a seminar talking about racial trauma. The speaker whose name I can't remember, was talking about this idea of a kind of intelligence that is often developed by marginalized people. And because this was a seminar on racial trauma in the United States, her examples were all primarily around racialized experiences as the United States understand that sense of racialized society. And so the idea of anticipatory intelligence is the amount of effort or energy that we put in emotionally, mentally, psychologically, to anticipating how our bodies and the stories that they represent will be received in a space that we are in before we get there.Speaker 1 (00:18):Welcome to the Arise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. In this episode, I get to interview my dear friend, Rebecca Wheeler Walston, and we are talking about anticipatory intelligence. I think all of us, or at least most of the people I speak with lately when I'm like, how are you doing? They're like, and they're like, well, that's a complicated answer. And it definitely is. There's an underlying sense of unease, of discontent, of just a lack of surety, about what is going to come next in the new year that I think I haven't felt for a long time. The collective sense that I have right now as you listen to this episode and take a sneak peek into some of the conversations Rebecca and I have had for a while, I encourage you to be kind to your body Again. I've put in previous episodes, resources, get out, get mental health care, spend time with friends, play, go play pickleball, get out in the snow, read a good book, text a friend, call a friend.(01:37):Do the things that connect you back to life giving activities. Find your spiritual practices, light candles, take a bath. All these things that therapists often say are helpful. I mean, maybe it's you go hug a tree or put your feet, your literal bare feet in the dirt. I don't know what it is for you, but leaning on the people and the resources in your area and also leaning on things that connect you back to groundedness, to feeling in your body. And so those are the things that I do. I enjoy lately eating Honey Nut Cheerios. Sounds weird. I love Dry Honey Nut Cheerios. I don't know why, but I let myself indulge in that. So again, I'm not prescribing anything to anyone. This is not a prescription, a diagnosis, a treatment plan. It is saying, how can you find ways to ground yourself in really good healthy ways that you can actually care for your good body?(02:50):I don't enjoy talking about anxiety. I don't love it. In fact, talking about it sometimes I feel really anxious in the moment my heart starts pounding, I get sweaty hands, et cetera. And yet there is something grounding for me about stepping into shared realities with my friends or neighbor, colleague or family. And so this is a reality that Rebecca and I have been talking about. What is anticipatory intelligence? And I'm going to let her jump in and start it off here. Hey, Rebecca, I know you and I chat a lot, and part of our talks are like, Hey, how you doing? Hey, how am I doing? And a while back when I reached out to you and said, Hey, let's do this thing way before the election on anxiety and race. And you're like, wait a minute. I want to talk about this thing called anticipatory intelligence. And so I want to hear about that from you. What is that?Speaker 2 (03:51):Hey, Danielle, as always, Hey, hey,(03:56):Post 2024 election, I'm going to just take a huge breath and say that I've had this low grade sort of nausea in my gut for at least a week, if not longer. So yeah, let's talk. So anticipatory intelligence is a phrase that I heard at a seminar talking about racial trauma. The speaker whose name I can't remember, was talking about this idea of a kind of intelligence that is often developed by marginalized people. And because this was a seminar on racial trauma in the United States, her examples were all primarily around racialized experiences as the United States understand that sense of racialized society. And so the idea of anticipatory intelligence is the amount of effort or energy that we put in emotionally, mentally, psychologically, to anticipating how our bodies and the stories that they represent will be received in a space that we are in before we get there.(05:23):So it's that notion of I'm a black woman, I'm getting ready to go to a function that I anticipate will likely be predominantly white. And the kind of internal conversation I have with myself about what that's going to feel like look like to enter the question in my mind of how safe or how dangerous might the environment be to me racially? So the first piece of anticipatory intelligence is that sort of internal conversation that we may be having with ourselves as we step into a circumstance. The second piece of that is when we arrive in the space and we start to read the room,(06:12):Read the faces of the people in the room, and this work of how close was my hypothesis or my theory about my reception in the room to what I'm actually seeing and feeling and hearing in the room as I enter the space is that sort of second piece of anticipatory intelligence. And then the third piece of it is really this question of how do I navigate that answers to those first two questions? And so what is my body, my brain, my emotions, my spirit, my gut, all of it doing with what I'm reading of the faces in the room and the reaction to me being there could be a positive space. I could get there and realize that the people in the room are all receptive to my presence and what I'm reading and feeling is a sense of welcome and warmth and an invitation for all of me to be in the room. And then what does that feel like in terms of the letdown of anxiety and the ability to absorb that sense of welcome and to participate in that sense of welcome? Or it could be a hostile environment. And what I'm reading is something that isn't welcome,(07:44):Something that feels like fill in the blank, resentment, who knows?(07:53):And then what does my body do with that? What does my gut do with that? What does my emotions, what does my spirit do? And how do I react and respond to what I'm actually reading in the room? So you can hear that sense of three steps, and sometimes that can happen over a matter of days, weeks as we build up to something. Sometimes that can happen in a matter of seconds as we enter a room, but the amount of effort and energy that is expended and the idea that you can actually develop a very well thought through grid for this as a kind of intelligence that can be yours individually might belong to your group. Collectively idea of how we anticipate and then how we engage a space based on and in this race, it could be extended to gender,Speaker 3 (08:58):ReligionSpeaker 2 (09:00):In this day and age, probably politics and any other places where we find intersectionality of the pieces of our identity.Speaker 1 (09:11):I had to take a deep breath because it is this giant reframing and pathologizing of what a lot of us walk around with, which is an internal disruption as we move from space to space.Speaker 2 (09:29):Yeah, I think that's true. And I mean, I think about it as a black woman, as a black mother raising two kids, I have taught my kids this notion of, I didn't call it that there's too many syllables and SAT words, but I have taught my kids a sense of pay attention to people and places and sounds and vibes and nonverbal communication and verbal communication and learn to interpret and decipher and then do what is necessary to keep yourself safe and do what is necessary to enjoy and participate in places where you're actually welcome.Speaker 1 (10:17):When that intersects with the concepts of Western psychology, let's say, where we're as a part of that system, there's this constant move to how do we heal anxiety, how do we work towards calm? How do we work towards finding a quote safe space? And I think it's becoming more and more evident in our current society. It's evident to many before, but I think some people are jostled into the reality that there might not be that safe space or you might have to understand anxiety differently than the western psychological framework. Have you thought about that?Speaker 2 (11:04):Yeah. I mean, couple of things, right? Is that in western sort of psychological space, the phrase that's usually engaged is something called hypervigilant. This idea that the time you spend reading a room and your sense of threat and the need to be vigilant about your own safety, the concept of hypervigilance is to say that you're overreactingSpeaker 3 (11:36):ToSpeaker 2 (11:37):The space and you have a kind of vigilance that is unnecessary. You have a kind of vigilance that is a trigger to some threat that doesn't actually exist. And therefore you as the person who is doing this anticipatory work, needs to rea acclimate to the room and engage the room as if you are safe and to reimagine or recalibrate your sense of threat to an idea that it doesn't exist and it's not there. And one of the things that I would pose is that's a false reality for marginalized people in the United States. The sense of a lack of safety is present and it's real. And therefore, could we be talking about a necessary kind of vigilance as opposed to an over reactive hypervigilance?(12:45):So that's kind of one way that I think is a necessary exploration, and it requires the country to wrestle with the truth and the why and how of the lack of safety for marginalized people, whether that is on racial lines or gender lines or whatever power structure we are engaging. There's always the question of those in power and those who are not. And if in that moment you are in the category of the disempowered and the disenfranchised, then a sense of your own vigilance might actually be the wisest, kindest thing you can do. And the error of modern psychology to pathologize that is the problem. The other thing that I think about because you use the word safety, and I did too often, and of the growing belief that the idea that I can be safe in an absolute sense is probably a misnomer at best, an illusion at worst. And so there can there be this sense of safer environments or safe ish environments or even the suggestion that I've heard in recent years of a sense of bravery instead of safety, the ability for the space, the room to hold, the idea that if there's a power differential, there's going to be a safety differential.(14:31):And so the question is not am I safe? The question is the level of courage or bravery that I may need to access in order to step into a room and note that there is a certain amount of of safety.Speaker 1 (14:50):And I think that can be played out on all levels. I mean, I attended a training on immigrant rights and one of the things they mentioned is that ICE has the ability, the immigration service has the ability to use a digital format on online form to write their own warrant. Now, we know that regular police cannot write their own warrant.(15:16):We know that ice can also obtain a warrant through the courts, but when you have an empowered police body to write their own warrant, even if you're not in an immigrant, what is a sense that you're going to actually be safe or you're going to walk into a room where there are those power differentials no matter what your race or ethnicity is. If you are not of the dominant class, what's the sense that you're going to feel safe in that power differential? I think as I hear you say, I don't want to go to the extreme that it's an illusion, but I do agree that each step out is a step of bravery. And some days we may have the bravery and the data points that say, despite this anticipation of potential harm, I'm going to be able to work through that today and I'm going to be with people who can work through that with me, even through the power differential. And I think in the coming days, and there's going to be times when we say I can't step into that space because of what I anticipate, not because I'm a coward, but because it may lead to more harm than I can metabolize.Speaker 2 (16:27):Yeah, I mean the word safe has its problem. So does the word brave, right? Because again, the weight of that word is on the marginalized person in many ways to push path, the power differential and show up anyway. And there's something about that weight and the imbalance of it that feels wildly unfair, but historically true.(17:00):And so what I love about your sense of there might be some days I do not have it in me, and then can we come to that moment with the reverence and the kindness and the sanctity that deserves for me and my individual capacity to say I don't have it today? And I say that knowing that most of us come from, I come from a cultural backdrop, a collective story around blackness and the black bravery and black courage and black power and black rights. That doesn't always give me space to say I don't have it in me. I don't have that bravery today. I don't have access to it. I come from a cultural narrative that screams we shall overcome in a thousand different ways. And so you can hear in that both a hope and then a demand that you find the capacity in every moment to overcome. And we don't have a lot of stories where you get to say, I don't have it. And I have some curiosity for you as a Latino woman, do you have those stories, those cultural narratives that give you permission to say, I don't have access to the kind of bravery that I need for today?Speaker 1 (18:40):That's a really good question. As you were speaking, I was thinking of the complexity of the constructed racial identity for Latinos, which is often a combination as you know, we've talked about it, a lot of indigenous African and then European ancestry. And so I often think of us coming into those spaces as negotiators. How do we make this okay for dominant culture folks? Can we get close enough to power to make it okay? Which is a costly selling out of one part of ourselves. And I think the narrative is like when you hear nationally, why do Latinos vote this way even though the electoral percentage is so low compared to dominant culture folks? So I think the question we have to wrestle with is what part of our identity are we going to push aside to fit in those spaces? Or sometimes the role of negotiator and access to privilege can lead to healing and good things.(19:53):And also there are spaces where we step into where that's not even on the table. It's going to be an option. And so can we step back and not have to be that designated person and say, actually, I can't do any negotiations. I don't have the power to do that. It's kind of a false invitation. It's this false sense of you can kind of belong if you do this, but you can't really belong. I want you to vote for me, but then in 30 days, 60 days, I'm going to deport you at risk to be arrested. So you have to vote against your own best interest in order to be accepted, but after being accepted, you're also rejected. So I think there's a sense for me as I ramble through it, I don't know where that permission comes from to step back, but I think we do need to take a long hard look and step backSpeaker 2 (20:57):Just listening to you. I have a sense that the invitation to your community is a little different than the invitation that has been extended to my community. And of course the extension of that invitation coming from the power structures of the western world of America, of whiteness. I hear you saying that if I'm mishearing you, let's chat. But what I hear is the sense of this notion that you can negotiate for acceptance, which I think is an invitation that has been extended to a lot of ethnic groups in the United States that do not include black people. Our history in the United States is the notion of one drop of black blood lands you in this category for which there will never be access. And I say that also knowing that part of the excitement of a candidacy of someone like Kamala Harris is the notion that somehow we have negotiated something or the possibility that we actually have negotiated a kind of acceptance that is beyond imagination. And in the days following the election, some of the conversation of literally she did everything that she has, all the degrees, she has the resume, she has this, she has that, and it wasn't enough to negotiate the deal(22:53):And the kind of betrayal. And so I started this by saying, oh no, y'all over there in Latinx spaces get to negotiate something we as black people. But I think that there's a true narrative in post civil rights post brown versus board of education that the negotiation that we are in as black people is if we get the degrees and we build the pedigree, we can earn the negotiated seat. And I think other ethnic spaces, and you tell me if this feels true to you, the negotiation has been about bloodline.Speaker 1 (23:50):Yeah, absolutely. And adjacent to that negotiated space is the idea that you wouldn't have to anticipate so much that you could walk in and feel safe or that no matter where you think about any of the presidential spaces, that Kamala Harris could walk in and she could be acceptedSpeaker 2 (24:15):And that she would bring all the rest of us with her. Yeah.Speaker 1 (24:29):I wanted to believe that this election was based on issues. And I wanted to believe that no matter where you stood on certain things that you could see through that Trump was going to be a deadly disaster for bodies of color. And yet that's not what happened.Speaker 2 (24:55):Yeah, I think, right. And my first pushback is like, he's a problem. He's a disaster not just for bodies of color. And I think there was some segment of the country making the argument that he is a detriment to a kind of ideal that affects us all regardless of race or creed or color or gender. And I am still trying to make meaning of what it means that that's not the choice we made as a country. I'm still trying to, in my head, logically balance how you could vote against your own interests. And I was watching a documentary this weekend, the US and the Holocaust, and one of the things that is true in that documentary is the fact that there has always been a strain of American life that voted against its own interest. That notion is not new. And if I try to think about that in psychological terms, I mean, how often have you seen that as a therapist, a client who makes decisions that are clearly against their own interest? And the therapeutic work is to get to a place where that is less and less true,Speaker 1 (26:38):Which I mean, I know we'll record a part two, I think of the collective meaning we are making out of this, that the sense that in the voting against our own self-interest, I can speak from my cultural background, you may say goodbye to your grandma or your brother. You may say goodbye to the friend down the street that runs a restaurant. And what does that do to your psyche? It's nothing new. We've been asked to do that for centuries. This is not new. This was introduced when colonial powers first arrived and we're asking for loyalty in exchange for some kind of a false hope of true safety. And yet when we experience this anxiety or this anticipatory intelligence, I think our bodies aren't just speaking from what's happening today, but the centuries of this was never, okay.Speaker 2 (27:48):See, again, I'm hit with that sentence reads different to me when I hear you as a Latino woman say, that's not a new negotiation for us. We've been asked to vote against our own interest from colonial days. And what does that cost you? I want to cry for that story of an immigration that sounded like it was voluntary and never actually was. And I say that feeling in my own experience, the trajectory of enslaved Africans were asked to negotiate something very different than that. What is the cost? It'll be a different kind of cost. There is a section of the black community that voted against our own interest in this election, and what does that mean and what's the story that we're telling ourselves around it in order to justify a choice? The consequences of which I think have yet to be made clear for any of us. I know that there's this anticipated, we can say the word mass deportation and think that we can anticipate the cost of that. And just from the few conversations you and I have had over the last week, I don't think any of our anticipatory work will be anywhere close to the actual cop.Speaker 1 (30:11):I think you're right. I think we will do our best based on what we've lived and tried to do for one another and for our own families to anticipate what we need, but we won't escape.Speaker 2 (30:38):I think the other thing that I think about is the cost is not just to Latinx people. There is a cost to all of us that are in proximity to you that is different and arguably far less. But I think we're missing that too. I think we're underestimating and miscalculating. There's a science fiction book that was written, I read it in college by the author's name is a guy named Derek Bell. He's a lawyer, and he wrote a book called Faces at the Bottom of the Well. And there's a chapter in the book's, a collection of short stories. There's a short story about the day all the Negroes disappeared. And the story is about this alien population from another planet who is disenchanted with the treatment of enslaved Africans. So they come to earth and they take everybody black. And the story is about what is no longer true of the planet because Africans are no longer enslaved. Africans in the US are no longer in it, on it. And all the things that are no longer true of American life, the things that will never become true of American life because of the absence of a people group. And I think that, again, we can say the phrase mass deportation and think we have some sense of what the cost of that might be. And I think we are grossly underestimating and miscalculating all the things that will not be true of American life.Speaker 1 (32:33):Yeah, I think I don't have words. I don't have a lot of explanations or what our kids will, what they're learning about life. I know we have to pause. Okay. Okay.Speaker 2 (33:09):Part two, to comeSpeaker 1 (33:10):Our cucumber. I'll catch you later. As you can see, we ended this podcast on a difficult note, and it's not a space that Rebecca and I are going to be able to resolve, and we are going to continue talking about it. So tune in to our next episode in part two. And I really think there's a lot of encouragement to be found in setting a frame and setting space for reality and what we are facing in our bodies and understanding ourselves and understanding as collectives, how this might be impacting us differently. Rebecca and I aren't speaking for everybody in our communities. They're not monoliths. We are speaking from our particular locations. Again, thank you for tuning in and I encourage you to download, share, subscribe, and share with others that that might be researching or thinking about this topic. Talk to you later. Bye.  Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Matthias Roberts is a queer  psychotherapist (in Washington State) and the author of both "Holy Runaways:Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned by Religion" and "Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms". He is one of my favorite friends I met in graduate school, a human deeply committed to connection and curiosity,  and someone who I deeply admire. With Matthias, I feel a sense of belonging and openness to understanding the world and holding space for that curiosity which is so threatening elsewhere. Rebecca W. Walston is an African American lawyer, who also holds a MA Counseling, an all around boss babe. Rebecca runs a Law Practice and serves as General Legal Counsel for The Impact Movement, Inc.  She is someone who fiercely advocates for others freedom and healing. She is a dear friend and colleague, who anyone would be lucky to spend a dinner with talking about almost anything.Trigger Warning: Proceed only if you are comfortable with potentially sensitive topics.This is not psychological advice, service, or prescriptive treatment for anxiety or depression. The content related to descriptions of depression, anxiety, or despair may be upsetting or triggering, but are clearly not exhaustive. If you should feel symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, please seek professional mental health services, or contact (in Kitsap County) Kitsap Mobile Crisis Team at  1-888-910-0416. The line is staffed by professionals who are trained to determine the level of crisis services needed. Depending on the need, this may include dispatching the KMHS Mobile Crisis Outreach Team for emergency assessment. Speaker 1 (00:18):Welcome to the Rise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. Today we're continuing our conversation on election humanity and politics. I have two guests today. I'm very excited about it. Matthias Roberts, who's a queer psychotherapist in Washington State, and the author of both Holy Runaways and Beyond Shame. Actually, he's one of my favorite friends I met in graduate school. I don't know if he knows that he's a human, deeply committed to connection and curiosity and someone I deeply admire with Matthias. I've always felt this sense of belonging and openness to understanding the world and holding space for that actual curiosity, which has seems so threatening elsewhere. So I want to thank Matthias for joining me and taking time out of his morning. And Rebecca Wheeler Walstead holds an MA in counseling an all around boss babe. Rebecca runs a law practice and serves as general legal counsel for the Impact movement, and she is someone who fiercely advocates for others freedom and healing. She's a dear friend, obviously she's a colleague and she's someone that anybody would be lucky to spend a dinner with talking about almost anything. So thank you, Rebecca, for joining me today.(01:40):I can say that for myself in my own experience, my anxiety is heightened overall and feelings that I can keep at bay with regular normal coping mechanisms such as exercise. It takes to me a little bit more and I have to offer myself a lot more grace in the process. I encourage you no matter where you are, to engage these topics with grace towards your own self, towards your neighbor, towards your family, and towards whoever's in your proximity. We won't get things done overnight no matter who we are, and we will get them done if we become more aligned and care more for those in our proximity, that means our neighbor. So if you're feeling or experiencing anxiety around the election or family or other triggers, I want you to encourage you to seek out and find someone to speak with. Maybe you need a mental health professional, maybe you need a spiritual advisor. Maybe it's your coach and it's something related to business. Maybe you need to go see your doctor for aches and pains you've been having. I don't know what it might be for you, but don't hesitate to reach out and get the help you need. We're going to jump into the conversation and voices from across the country. We are all different and we're not meant to be the same. I hope you find pieces of you in each of their stories. Hey, Rebecca. Hey, Matthias. Thanks for being with me today.Speaker 2 (03:06):Daniel, thanks for havingSpeaker 1 (03:07):Us. I just thought we would talk about this really amazing subject of politics and humanness because we're so good at it in the United States. Yeah, right. Y'all thoughts on that? Even as I say that, just politics and being human, what comes to mind?Speaker 2 (03:34):For me, there's almost a dual process happening. I think about my first thought was, well, politics are, but then I also thought about how when we separate institutions out from people, especially in the way that corporations tend to separate out how they become anti-human so quickly, and not that politics is necessarily a corporation, but I think there's a form of it. There's something corporate about it. And so I think about that juxtaposition and maybe the dichotomy there between, yeah, it's human, but I think it's also anti-human in the ways that it has to, I think almost by definition, separate from maybe these places of deep feeling or nuance in order to collapse all of that experience into something that people can rally on.Speaker 3 (04:51):I think there's something dehumanizing about our current politics, but I think that that is about power. I think when politics becomes about the consolidation of power or the perpetuation of power or the hanging on to it sort of desperately, then it no longer is about the people that the institutions and the country was built to serve and protect. And so I think there are all these ideals in our politics that on paper and in theory sound amazing, but when people in their humanness or maybe in the worst of our humanness step away from other people and not just people as sort of this collective generalized, but the actual person in front of you, the actual person in front of you and the story that they have and the life that they live, and how decisions and theories and ideals will impact the actual person in front of you. And when politics becomes about collecting power and maintaining that power at all costs, then it's no longer about people. It's no longer about lives. It's no longer about stories, and all those things become expendable in the name of the consolidation and the maintenance of power. And I think that at its heart is a human question. It's a question of selfishness and self-serving and maybe even self idolatry.Speaker 1 (06:49):I think that I agree, Matthias, I've been thinking a lot about, because in my family it's been a lot of comments like, well, we shouldn't talk about politics because we're family. I'm like, wait a minute, wait just a minute. Because the very politic that is being said from one angle is hurting the humanity of this other particular family member. How do we make sense of that? How do we say politics isn't a very human, the impact is meant to impact humans. The power is meant to impact humans, so the political sphere has become so toxic to us.Speaker 3 (07:40):Yeah, I think that sentence, we shouldn't talk about politics because we're family. It says more about maybe our fragility as a culture in this moment and our inability to have hard conversations without feeling like the difficulty of them fractures, relationships and familial bonds in ways that cannot be repaired or restored in any way. And I think it is also a statement about the toxicity of our politics that we have allowed it to get to a place where it actually threatens those kinds of familial bonds in some sense, you want go back to, you remember that book that was big in the nineties? All I ever learned about life I learned in kindergarten, right? All I ever needed to know, it reminds me of that because raising kids, I would raise my kids to say, there isn't anything on this earth that should fracture your bond as siblings. I raised them to believe that. I insisted that they engage the world from this vantage point that come hell or high water do or die is you and your sister. That's it. And it doesn't matter what happens in this world, there should never be a scenario in which that isn't true. And we have arrived at this place where people honestly believe that your political affiliation somehow threatens that.(09:19):That's sad and sad feels like a word that's not heavy enough to articulate. There's something wrong, really wrong if that's where we are,Speaker 2 (09:35):I think it speaks perhaps to our inability to do conflict well, and I'm the first, I don't do this all with my family at all. I'm terrible at conflict with my family, at least in the arena of politics. But I think about, I wonder if some of the fracturing that we say, I don't think it's all of it by any means, but is that reality of, because we can't have these conversations in our immediate family, it's getting projected into the wider, I mean, it has to play out somewhat. It is going to, that's the nature of it. So because we can't do it locally, it is having to play out on this grand scale. Rebecca, as you said, sad. I think it's horrifying too.Speaker 1 (10:44):It's what?Speaker 2 (10:45):Horrifying.Speaker 1 (10:46):Yes. It's very dangerous to be honest.Speaker 2 (10:54):It's very, yeah, those bonds, we have the familial bonds. Those are protective in some ways when we remove that, we remove those protections.Speaker 1 (11:11):I think we've been practicing at a society, and I'm talking particularly about the United States at ways of removing those bonds in multiple spheres of the way we've thought about life, the way we think about another person, the way we judge each other, the way we vote in past elections. I mean, the civil rights movement is pushing against that notion that family means dehumanizing someone else. And so even this idea of, I'm not even sure if I can say it right, but just how we've constructed the idea of family and what do our shared values mean. In some sense, it's been constructed on this false notion that someone is worth more than another person. Now, when that person shows up as fully human, then I think we don't know what to do with it.Speaker 3 (12:11):Yeah. I think something you said, Mathias about we don't do conflict well, right? I think rarely is any issue, black and white. Rarely is any issue. So clear cut and so definitive that you can boldly stand on one side or the other and stay there in perpetuity without ever having to wrestle or grapple with some complexity, some nuance. And I think maybe part of what we don't do well is that right? Somehow we've gotten to this space where we have maybe an oversimplified if that, I'm not even sure that's a good word, perspective on a number of issues as if there isn't any complexity and there isn't any nuance and there isn't any reason to pause and wonder if context or timing would change the way we think about something, right? And nor do we think that somehow changing your mind is no longer acceptable.(13:20):I think about, I saw a number of interviews with Kamala Harris. People talk to her about, well, why'd you change your mind about this or that? Why'd you change your perspective about this or that? And then part of the conversation was about when did we get to this place where growing and learning and changing your mind is bad for someone who is in the profession of holding public office since when can you not get in public office, learn some things differently, meet some new people, understand the issue better, and go, you know what? I need to change the way I think about this, but we are there. All of a sudden it means you're not fit for office, at least as it has been applied to Kamala Harris in this particular and even before her. The notion of a flip flopper is again to say you can't somehow change your mind.Speaker 2 (14:21):So that makes me start to then think about some of the myths, and I mean that deeper theological myth in the sense of not that it is untrue, but more in the sense of how it permeates culture. That's when I say myth and we have this idea or many people have this idea of a God that doesn't change, a God who doesn't change his mind as the ideal of there is right there is wrong, and the ideal is no change. And we have examples and scriptures, at least I believe, of a God who does change his mind, who sees what happens and change is what he does. And I think those can be compatible with maybe some ideas that maybe God doesn't change, but we also have examples of God changing his mind. But I think that has permeated our world of something unchanging is better than someone who or something who does change. And I wonder what that impact has beenSpeaker 3 (15:38):That made me pause. I certainly come out of a faith background of hold to God's unchanging hand. I mean, I can come up off the top of my head with a dozen different examples of the notion of he does not shift, he does not change. And the kind of comfort or solidity that can be found in this notion that we're not subject to the whim of his mood in any given time, but what you said causes me to think about it and to think about what does it mean to say that we live in a world where there is a God who can be persuaded by something in the human context that will cause him to respond or react differently than perhaps his original mindset is. I'm going to walk away from this conversation pondering that for a while. I think,Speaker 2 (16:30):Yeah, there are stories of that in scripture.Speaker 3 (16:36):The one that comes to my mind is the story of, and I'm not going to get all the names correct, so whoever's listening, forgive me for that. But the story that comes to my mind is the prophet of old who is pleaded with God for more time on earth, for more space to be alive and walk the earth as a human being. And God granted his request. And again, now there's a bit of a paradigm shift for me. What does it mean to say that I live in a world where there's a God who can be persuaded? I think the other thing when you said about a God who changes his mind, what comes up for me is also a God who holds extremely well the nuance and the complexity of our humanness and all that that means. And so often I find it's sort of the pharmaceutical attitude that we can have that things are rigid and there's only one way to see it and one way to do it. And if you ever watch Jesus's engagement with the Pharisees, it's always actually the problem is more complex than that. Actually the question you're asking is more than that. And so what matters less is the rule. What matters more is the impact of that rule. And if we need to change the rule in order for the appropriate impact, then let's do that.Speaker 1 (18:08):It's kind of gets back to something I've been learning in consultation, talking about this idea. I think we're talking about very young spaces collectively for our society. If I was to put it in that frame, the idea of as a child, a very young kid, even into your teenagers, you need to know something solid. You need to know that's not changing. That's the rule. That's what I got to do. And it's the parent's responsibility to make meaning and metabolize nuance for you and help you process through that. But one of our first developmental things is to split. This is good, this is bad, this person is safe, this person. That's a developmental process. But in somewhere we got stuck,Speaker 3 (18:54):It brings to my mind, you've heard me reference raising kids. And so I raised my kids to say this idea that you have to be respectful and thoughtful in your choices. And I always told my kid that so long as you are respectful and thoughtful in your choices, your voices will always be heard and welcomed kind of in our home. And so my daughter approached me, she's making an argument about something that I absolutely did not agree with her final conclusion. I was like, there's no version of anybody's universe where you're doing that, right? And she says to me, but you said if I was thoughtful and I was respectful that I could assert my position and I have been respectful in my tone and I've been thoughtful in my position. And she was absolutely right. Both had been true, and I found myself having to say, okay, now I sort of backed myself into a corner.(19:58):She followed me into it and the conversation ended up being about, Hey, that's true. Those are the parameters, but you're older now and the things that you're making decisions about have more impact and they're more nuanced and complex than that. So we need to add a couple more things to your rubric, and it's a hard conversation to have, but it makes me think about that developmental piece that you're saying, Danielle, that when we're younger, there's certain sort of bright line rules and the older you get and the more complex life gets, the more you need to be able to actually blur those lines a little bit and fudge them a little bit and sometimes color outside of the lines because it is the right thing to do.Speaker 2 (20:48):I think that movement from that really kind of rigid split into Rebecca what you're talking about, it requires that grappling with grief and loss, it requires that sense of even if I followed the rules, I didn't get what I wanted. And that is we have options there. We can rage against it and go back into the split, you are bad. I'm good, or actually grapple with that. I did everything I was supposed to and it still didn't work out in that words, it doesn't feel good and grieve and feel the pain of that and actually work with those parts of ourselves. And there is so much that our nation has not grieved, not repented from, and we are in the consequences of that.Speaker 1 (21:53):I was just thinking that Mathias, it's like we're asking one another to make meaning, but we're at a very base level of meaning making. We're trying to first discern, discern what is reality, and a lot of times we don't share reality, but when you're a baby, the reality is your caregiver hopefully, or even the absence of you become accustomed to that. And so I think we've become accustomed to this sense of almost this indoctrination of a certain type of religion, which I would call white evangelical Christianity, where they're telling you, I can make sense of all of this from the perspective of race. I can do that for you. Whether they talk about it explicitly or not, they're like, I can tell you what's good and bad from this perspective, but then if you add in how do you make sense of all the Christians vote for Trump and 84% of African-Americans are going to vote for Kamala Harris. I grew up thinking, are those people not Christians? I didn't know as a kid, I was raised with my father. I didn't understand, didn't make sense to me, but I thought, how could so many people as a child, I actually had this thought, how could so many people not know Jesus, but go to church and how could all these people know Jesus and say they're going to heaven? It never made sense to me.Speaker 3 (23:19):I mean, what you're saying, Danielle, is probably why there is a very clear historical and present day distinction between white evangelism and the black church. That's why those two things exist in different spaces because even from the very beginning, white evangelicalism or what became white evangelicalism advocated for slavery, and Frederick Douglass learned how to read by reading the scripture at risk to his own life and to the white slave owner who taught him how to read. And once he learned to read and absorbed the scriptures for himself, his comment is there is no greater dichotomy than the Christianity of this world and the Christianity of scripture. And so your sense that it doesn't make any sense is as old as the first enslaved African who knew how to understand the God of the Bible for him or herself and started to say out loud, we got problems, Houston.Speaker 1 (24:39):Yeah, I remember that as a young child asking that question because it just never made sense to me. And obviously I understand now, but as a kid you grow up with a certain particular family, a Mexican mom, a white father. I didn't know how to make sense of that.Speaker 3 (25:04):I mean, you say, oh, even now I understand and I want to go. You do. I don't explain that to me. I mean, there's a certain sense in which I think we're all in many ways, and I say all the country as a whole church, the American church as a whole trying to make sense of what is that, what was that and what do we do now that the modern sort of white evangelical movement is essentially the Christianity of our entire generation. And so now that that's being called into question in a way that suggests that perhaps it is white and it's religious, but it might not in fact be the Christianity of the Bible. Now what do we do? And I've spent some time in recent years with you, Danielle, in some Native American spaces in the presence of theologians who reckoned with things of God from a Native American perspective.(26:09):And if nothing else, I have learned there's a whole bunch. I don't know about what it means to walk with the God of the Bible and that my native brothers and sisters know some things I don't know, and I am kind of mad about it. I'm kind of angry actually about what it is they know that was kept from me that I was taught to dismiss because the author of those ideas didn't look like the white Jesus whose picture was in my Bible or on the vacation Bible school curriculum or whatever. I'm sort of angry at the wisdom they hold for what it means to be a follower of what I think in many native spaces they would refer to as creator, and that was withheld from me. That would've changed the way, enhanced the way I understand this place of faith. And something that white evangel and evangelicalism expressly said was heresy was of the devil was to be ignored or dismissed or dismantled or buried.Speaker 1 (27:31):I mean, you have Tucker Carlson referring to Trump as daddy in a recent speech. So you then have this figure that can say, Hey, little kids, don't worry. Your worldview is okay. It's still right and let me make sense of it. I can make sense of it for you with X, Y, Z policies with racist rhetoric and banter. I can do anything I want. I can show up in Madison Square Garden and replicate this horrific political rally and I can do it and everybody will be okay with it, even if they're not okay, they're not going to stop me. So we still have a meaning maker out there. I mean, he is not making my meaning, but he's making meaning. For a lot of folks.Speaker 3 (28:29):It is even worse than that. There's a couple of documentaries that are out now. One's called Bad Faith, the other one's called God and Country, and in one of them, I think it was Bad Faith, and they're talking about the rise of Christian nationalism. For me, as a person of faith, one of my biggest questions has always been, there's nothing about this man's rhetoric that remotely reflects anything I ever learned in every Sunday school class and every vacation Bible school, in every Bible study and every church service I've ever been to. He is boldly antithetical to all of it.(29:06):And he says that out loud, right back to his comments about, no, I've never asked God for forgiveness because I've never done anything that warranted forgiveness that is antithetical to the heart of evangelical Christianity that asserts that the only way to God and to heaven in the afterlife is through the person of Jesus Christ. And so every person has to admit their own sin and then accept Christ as the atonement for that sin. And he bluntly says, I don't do that. Right. So my question has always been, I don't get it right. Two plus two is now four in your world. So how are 80% of evangelicals or higher voting for this man? And in that movie, bad faith, they talk about, they make reference to the tradition of Old Testament scripture of a king who is not a follower of God, who God sort of uses anyway towards the bent of his own will.(30:18):And there's probably a number of references in Old Testament scripture if I was an Old Testament theologian, some of the people who have invested in me, I could give you names and places and dates. I can't do that. But there is a tradition of that sort of space being held and the notion what's being taught in some of these churches on Sundays and on Wednesday night Bible study is that's who he is. That's who Trump is in a religious framework. And so he gets a pass and permission to be as outlandish and as provocative and as mean spirited and as dare I say, evil or bad as he wants to be. And there is no accountability for him in this life, or the next one, which I don't even know what to say to that, except it's the genius move to gaslight an entire generation of Christians that will probably take hold and be with us for far longer than Trump is on the political landscape.Speaker 2 (31:29):I am not fully convinced it's gaslighting. On one hand it is. They're saying one thing, doing another. It absolutely is by definition. And I think growing up in white evangelicalism, there is, at least for the men, I think an implicit belief, I don't even think it's explicit. It's becoming explicit that they get that past too. It functions on those passes, those senses of we don't have to hold up to accountability. And I think we see that in all the sexual abuse scandals. We see that in the narcissism of so many white evangelical pastors. There is this sense of, as long as we're in this system, there isn't accountability. And so you can say one thing and do another, and it doesn't matter. You have God's authority over you and therefore it's okay. And so I think there's something, I'm right there with you, it doesn't make any sense, but I think it's also quite consistent with the way that authority has been structured within thoseSpeaker 1 (33:14):Spaces that you said that I felt like, I don't know if you ever get your heartbeat right in your neck, but I had it right there. Oh, yeah. I think that feels true. Yeah, it's gaslighting, but also it's meant to be that way.Speaker 3 (33:39):Do you think that that's new math or is that at the inception? What do you attribute the origin of that? And I don't disagree with you, I'm just sitting here like, damn, okay, so where does that come from and how long has it been there?Speaker 2 (34:04):I don't know. I have guesses. I think, how do you enslave an entire people without something like that and then found literal denominations that are structured on these power and authority? It goes back to what you were saying at the beginning, Rebecca, it's about power and accountability supports power.Speaker 3 (34:50):Yeah. Have you read The Color of Compromise?Speaker 2 (34:59):There's a documentary by that same name, right? The filmSpeaker 3 (35:02):There might beSpeaker 2 (35:05):See the film. Yeah.Speaker 3 (35:07):So he makes a comment in the book. He is writing this chapter about sort of the origins of the country and the country is as the colonies are being formed before it is a country, the colonists are in this sort of public debate about slavery and Christianity. And at least in tissie's research, there's sort of this group of colonists who come to the United States or what will become the US for the sake of proselytizing, evangelizing who they term savage, native and then enslaved Africans. And they're having this public conversation about does the conversion of a native or an African to Christianity remove them from slavery, essentially? Can you theologically own someone who's a profess child of God?(36:32):And Tse says that the origin of that debate has to do with an old English law that said that you can't enslave someone who is of the faith. And I remember reading that and thinking to myself, there's something wrong with the logic that you think you have the right to own any human being regardless of their faith belief system or not. There's something wrong with the premise in general that you believe as another human being, you have the right to own or exercise dominion over another human soul. So those are the things that go across my mind as I listen to you talk and propose the notion that this issue has been there, this flaw in the thinking has been there from the beginning.Speaker 1 (37:40):I was just thinking, I am reading this book by Paola Ramos about defectors and how Latinos in the US have moved to the far right, and she makes a case that the faith of the Spaniards told them that in order to achieve superiority, they should basically make babies with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. And they went about and did that. And then I know we always think popular literature, the United States, oh, India has this caste system. That's what people say, but really Latin America has a really complex caste system too. And to which after they brought over, and Rebecca and I know Matthias, you guys know this, but after they brought over stole African human bodies, a majority of them came Latin America, what we know as Latin America, they didn't come here to the United States to the continental us. And so then you have this alliance then between, and I'll bring it back to politics between these mixed Spaniards with indigenous folks also in enslaving Africans.(38:56):So then you get to our political commentary and you're recruiting Latinos then to join the Evangelical white church movement. And they've often been demonized and excluded in spaces because of citizenship, which adds its own complexity where African-Americans, now they have citizenship right now on the current day, but then you have these Latinos that it can be born or they're brought over on daca. So then you have this complexity where not only is there this historical century hating of African-Americans and black folks in Latino culture, but you also have this sense of that to get ahead, you have to align with white folks to come against African-Americans. You have all of that in the mix, and also then you also have to deny yourself and the fact that you have African heritage and indigenous heritage, so it's this huge mind fuck, right? How do you make sense of that colonial jargon in the political landscape? And then how does a Latino think, how do they actually encounter the nuance of their humanity and all of that, but complexly set up by the Spanish who said, we're going to enslave this X people group. In the meantime, we'll just mix our mix with this certain race, but the white people will be more dominant. And so you see that all comes into the United States politic and who gets to be human and who gets not to be human.Speaker 3 (40:44):I mean, in some ways, Daniel, you're pointing out that, and I think this goes back to math's point of several minutes ago, none of this is new under the sun. All of this is just current day manifestations or reenactments of a racialized dynamic that's been in play since forever, since even before maybe even the American colonies, right? Because what happened in terms of the transatlantic slave trade in Latin America predates some of that.Speaker 2 (41:18):Yeah. I mean, I think about England colonizing a huge portion of the world under the name of their faith that requires quite a distancing from accountability in humanity. Then you get an extreme fringe of those folks starting their own colonies.Speaker 3 (41:47):I mean, it does make me think, and my Pentecostalism is about the show, but it does make me think that there's something about this whole dynamic that's starting to feel really ancient and very old patterns that have been in place, and to me suggests from a spiritual standpoint, an enemy that is organized and intentional, and I have begun to wonder less than a week out from the election, what's the game plan if the election doesn't go the way I hope it does? What happens if America decides to give into its lesser urges as it has done in the past, and choose a path that is contrary and antithetical to its ideals what we're going to do? I ask that not even from a practical standpoint as much as spiritually speaking, how am I going to breathe and how am I going to make meaning of what you do with a world where that's the reality? We were talking before we got on air about the rally in Times Square and we can rail against it all we want, but there was hundreds of thousands of people there saying, yeah, let's do that.Speaker 4 (43:40):That scares me. AndSpeaker 2 (43:52):It doesn't go away. Even if Harris wins, I think your question of what do we do if Trump wins? It's a sobering question. It's a terrifying question, but I think it's also a very similar question of even if she wins, what do we do? What do we do? These people don't magically disappear.Speaker 1 (44:30):We're going to have to do no matter what. I just feel like there has to be some sort of, like you said, Mathias, just processing of the grief of our past because it's chasing us. You can hear it in each of our stories. It is just chasing us what we've been a part of, what we've been asked to give up. And I think America, well, the United States, not America, but the United States is terrified of what it would mean if it had to face that kind of grief.Speaker 3 (45:23):I don't know about that, Danielle, because for there to be terror would mean that you have had some conscious admission that something is gravely wrong. And I'm not even sure if we're there yet. I think America as a whole has a whole lot of defense mechanisms and coping mechanisms in place, so they never even have to get that far. And I don't know what you call that, what comes before the terror, right? Because terror would mean some part of you has admitted something, and I just don't know if we're there. And that's just me meandering through a thought process. ButSpeaker 1 (46:19):Oh, that's scary too, right? I think you're probably right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think we're going to bump up against our time. I know, Mathias, you have something coming up too, but any final thoughts? I don't expect us to solve anything or wrap it up, butSpeaker 2 (46:47):I'm just noting how I'm feeling and there's something both sobering and grounding about this conversation. I don't think we've covered really any kind of necessarily new territory, but to continue to speak these things, it's so brain, but it's also like, okay, we can ground ourselves in these things though. These things are true and it's terrible, but when we ground ourselves, we have ground just, and that feels different from some of the up in the air anxiety I was feeling before coming to this coverage, just the general anxiety of the election that is so pervasive. So that's a shift.Speaker 3 (47:53):I think I found myself looking back a lot in recent days back to the history of the story of African hyphen Americans in the United States, back to some fundamental things that I learned about my faith early on. And I have a sense of needing to return to those things as part of grounding that regardless of what happens in the next week or the next several months or even the next six months, we have been here before as a country, as a people, and we have survived it, and we will do so again. If I think about the black national anthem, God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, and I have found myself needing to return to those traditions and those truths, and I think I'll stay there for as long as my mind and my body and my emotions will allow me to as a way of breathing through the next several days. I mean, talk to me on November 6th. That might be in a very different place, or January 6th or January 20th, but for today, I find myself looking back, I have some curiosity for each of you. What are those traditions for you, in your own spaces, in your family, in your culture, in your people? What are the things that have grounded you in the past, and can they ground you again going forward?Speaker 2 (49:43):I'm sitting here finding myself wanting to come up with some beautiful answer. And the reality is I don't know that I have a beautiful answer. It's a difficult task.Speaker 1 (50:00):Yeah. I mean, no, we're wrapping up. I can't give you anything clever except I think what comes to mind is I often just tell myself just the next hour, the next day, sometimes I don't even think about tomorrow. I tell myself, don't rush too much. You don't know what's in tomorrow. Today's going to be okay. So I kind of coach myself up like stay in the moment.Speaker 3 (50:38):And in all fairness, Danielle, your people, if you will, are facing a very different kind of threat under a Trump presidency than mine are, and that is, I'm firmly of the belief if he's going to come for one of us, eventually he will come for all of us. But I'm also very aware that the most pressing existential threat is coming against people of Latinx descent people who very well may be American citizens, are facing the potential reality that won't matter. And so your sense of blackness gay through the next hour, I'm good. I have a lot of respect for what these days are requiring of you. Thank you.Speaker 1 (51:43):Thanks for hopping on here with me, guys.Speaker 2 (51:47):Thank you.   Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

Trigger Warning: Proceed only if you are comfortable with potentially sensitive topics.This is not psychological advice, service, or prescriptive treatment for anxiety or depression. The content related to descriptions of depression, anxiety, or despair may be upsetting or triggering, but are clearly not exhaustive. If you should feel symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, please seek professional mental health services, or contact (in Kitsap County) Kitsap Mobile Crisis Team at  1-888-910-0416. The line is staffed by professionals who are trained to determine the level of crisis services needed. Depending on the need, this may include dispatching the KMHS Mobile Crisis Outreach Team for emergency assessment. Danielle  (00:26):Welcome to the Rise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. This is a part two of our season five opener, which was review and recap of the past year, and also engaging some questions around humanity, the election, and how do we see our neighbor? We are going to be hearing from a couple of organizers who have been in my county, Kitsap County for more than a decade. You're going to hear some of their experiences, some of what they've gone through, as well as a few other folks who are giving their response to the questions we posed last week. I've been doing a lot of listening. This isn't an endorsement for any candidate. This isn't a psychological advice, and this isn't a prescription for how you should vote. Voting is a right. It's something we can participate in. It's a way to participate in our system.  A lot of folks are swinging wildly between two pendulums. There's the thought of my vote doesn't matter and I'm not going to vote, or I'm going to vote for X person as a protest vote. These are all of your rights. You have the right to do. So. I've been thinking a lot about change and what does change mean? How do we want to see change come about, and what does long-term change really look like? I can't speak from an electoral politics standpoint because I'm not an elected official and I don't plan to be anytime soon. I can speak as a person, a mother, a wife, a partner, a colleague, a friend, and a community member. And what I can say is people powered movements are what I have seen from the ground up, bring change in communities. This isn't unlike what happens in our bodies from a psychological experience in my own body. Change doesn't come from merely thinking about it. It comes from the ground up in my body. It comes from addressing the feelings, paying attention to my body, and becoming a more integrated person. I would challenge all of us to look around and what are the people powered movements for social change that we desire, and what are the ways our body is talking to us and how if we listen, will it inform us where we stand on many of these different issues?  This brings me to another sensitive topic. The topic of how we are feeling, how we are doing in the sociopolitical climate. We're living in these United States. I can say that for myself in my own experience, my anxiety is heightened overall and feelings that I can keep at bay with regular normal coping mechanisms such as exercise. It takes me a little bit more and I have to offer myself a lot more grace in the process. I encourage you no matter where you are, to engage these topics with grace towards your own self, towards your neighbor, towards your family, and towards whoever's in your proximity. We won't get things done overnight. That's not how change works. Change is a process. It is for us as individuals, and it is for us as a collective society. So hang in there. If you need help, get the help you need.  Maybe it's a mental health counselor, maybe it's a spiritual advisor. Maybe it's your pastor, maybe it's your friend. Maybe it's someone in your community that you look up to, like a mentor, or maybe you just need to sit down with your friends and have a good old fashioned dinner and drinks and put your phones away. Whatever the help you need is, it's important that you seek out that help and that support. The goal isn't to be perfect. It isn't to be fixed. The goal is to be in our process and getting what we need so each day we can show up for ourselves and those in our community. We're going to jump into the conversation and voices from across the country. We are all different and we're not meant to be the same. I hope you find pieces of you in each of their stories.  Speaker 2 (04:37):Hi, this is Raquel Jarek and I'm coming to you from Bloomington, Minnesota, which is a suburb in the Minneapolis area. I teach astronomy for work to college students in downtown Minneapolis and am an aerospace engineer and was raised in a very Christian home. And I'm still a practicing Christian in many ways, and I make space for people with different political views in all kinds of moments in my life. I do it at my work with students because I have a variety of people in my classes. I'm actually challenging them to vote and to even investigate the two major political candidates for president on what they view of science and space and how they would support NASA or space exploration. And I get to know my students pretty well in person, especially not as much with my online students, but I want to make space and have a comfortable room where people can share a little bit of how they feel, but also not be offensive to people with a variety of opinions in the room.  Speaker 2 (05:44):And then there's a variety of opinions in my family on my side of the family and my in-laws and which candidates they support and which parties they affiliate with. I want to be a person who is about supporting different opinions and being able to be loving and welcoming to anyone in any opinion. And sometimes that can be difficult when people have conflicting views in the room. I think you might need to keep the conversation more surface level and fun and in smaller conversations maybe you can dive into what they think more. But that can be really challenging to go deep with people who are very opposite opinions. At the same time, I like to have challenging conversations about politics and religion, and I think being open to those conversations whenever those topics come up is good. And then also just remember to be kind. And I think that's definitely easier to do in person than online or in a social media space, but that face-to-face contact does bring out more humanity and more kindness in people. So I hope that helps and that people can make more time and space to treat others kindly and hear opinions. Thanks.  Danielle (07:04):What were you going to say about the election?  Sarah  (07:08):Oh, I'm just feeling stressed about how close this election is. And it's just sort of extraordinary to me that given the many, many flaws in the Trump offering that people would still vote for him, that he's clearly mentally impaired and authoritarian, happy with dictators, mean-spirited and more of a mafia boss than a presidential candidate. And it's just extraordinary to me that, and I've always known people like that existed. It's just extraordinary to me that so many people would be planning to vote for him. So I am feeling a little stressed this morning,  Speaker 1 (07:55):Pam, I saw you nod your head.  Speaker 4 (07:58):Oh, I agree with everything that Sarah said. I have the same I deep, deep apprehensions and anxiety, and I think we're living in a landscape of anxiety just on the edge of a nation that at least half of it wants to go over that edge and pull the other half down with them. And it's really frightening. It's real. And I think I'm also frightened by people who are putting their heads in the sand. That's their response either out of just inconvenience or their terror response. So we're in a situation,  Speaker 1 (09:04):I agree. I feel that. I feel it come out in so many different ways. So for instance, as a licensed mental health therapist, something gets said like it was this last week where the former president is at a rally comments on anatomy. It gets blasted across the airwaves. And then what I notice that happens across my workspace is that people are triggered in their family relationships. They're triggered in with community. They're on heightened alert with a neighbor. I noticed this is last week we had two different really random requests. One was to adjust our fence because of the view. And if you know my yard, I live way out in the country, no one's looking. The second thing that happened to us was like, your car is parked at an odd angle sort of thing. So can we switch it around? I wasn't home. I got the message. And immediately when the message popped up, I felt so much anxiety and I was trying to talk myself off the ledge. I'm like, you can move this car, Danielle, when you go home, you can move this. This is fixable. You can come back from this. But the way I understand it is there's all my cup of navigating anxiety and uncertainties already up to here. So if my car's crooked somewhere, I'm freaking out.  Speaker 4 (10:44):I think that's happening all over the place. I mean, we saw an example yesterday afternoon with that involved pizza and chicken and people being much deeper issues and wounds being triggered by that, and we just have to take care of each other. I think we really, my priority is number one for the foreseeable future is public safety and how do we take care of each other when a lot of us can't call the people in the system that are supposed to give us support when they're not there, or they are part of what is creating problems and cruelty and insensitivity. So I mean, that's the only thing that's on my mind right now is public safety.  Speaker 1 (12:16):Sarah, thank you, Pam. Sarah, what comes to mind? We're kind of discussing the nature of political dialogue in our current climate. What do you see at stake if we do not vote?  Speaker 3 (12:31):Yeah, so that's what I've been thinking a lot about because I know there's a lot of people feeling that as a principled matter, they don't want to participate in voting, especially when the Biden administration has not been taking the ethical stand. We would like them to take on Gaza, for example. That's kind of a particularly heightened one, and it's really hard to feel like by voting somehow you're participating, you're condoning genocide. So I really get that and struggle with that myself. And here's where I come down is that I don't feel like any presidential candidate since I've started voting, which was a very long time ago, that any presidential candidate, except for when McGovern was voting, was running to get us out of Vietnam War, that there's been a presidential candidate that I was voting for with enthusiasm, we vote strategically. And that's one of the things the working family party is so good at.  Speaker 3 (13:35):They say we're voting strategically. We're voting to build power so that we as a movement can get things done. That doesn't mean the person who's running for president or any other office is our leader. We're not getting behind them as like, okay, all our loyalty is to this individual. We're voting strategically because this person in office is more likely to, number one, give us the space to build a social movement that can actually build power. And number two, to be swayed by the social movement to care when people show up and protest and people gone strike. And when people's movements do what they do so well, they care enough to then be willing to change policies. And so that's the way I feel about it. I don't feel like we have to believe that Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz are the people that we believe are the most, are everything we would hope for.  Speaker 3 (14:33):We just have to say, will this person allow social movements that care about poor people, that care about immigrants, they care about the environment, will they allow those social movements to progress? And we desperately need that progress. And on the other hand, if we end up with somebody like Trump, I mean, I think part of the appeal of Trump in the beginning, I mean when he ran the first time around, I think the appeal for a lot of people was they were just so angry at the system as it is that voting for Trump was throwing a bomb into the middle of government and seeing what landed because they didn't want to continue the status quo. And that felt more satisfying. Well, we kind of know what that looked like. We know who got hurt there. And we know also that this time around he has less to lose.  Speaker 3 (15:25):He doesn't have another term to run for, so he doesn't have to placate anybody. There is no group of people that he has to be concerned about except for the people who give him money and give him power. And so that's what the entire government will be oriented around is giving Donald Trump lots of flattery, lots of power and lots of money. And we know what that looks like in Russia because that's kind of what happened when the Berlin wall fell, is that they kind of sold off the whole government to a bunch of rich people, and it became just thoroughly corrupt. It's not like we don't have corruption now we do, but just wait until the whole government is privatized and Elon Musk owns this chunk and Peter tha owns this chunk, and it's like the rest of you, we don't care because we've got AI to do your job. Anyway,  Speaker 1 (16:24):Pam, thoughts or response?  Speaker 4 (16:28):Yeah, no, I think all of that is right on. We sort of can oscillate between the most local level, the national level, and global politics. So we're part of a very extraordinary zeitgeist of authoritarianism popping up in multiple countries. And I heard a podcast a week or so ago talking about authoritarianism in other countries, and they pointed out, and especially in Europe, that there very, very forceful, very strong, very loud, very visible, but they are not the majority in those countries. And I think because we see and hear more about authoritarianism on a daily basis and the ratcheting up of the horrible violent rhetoric that we can easily feel like we are the minority. And I don't know that we're a big majority. And I think that there's a lot of qualifications to what constitutes authoritarianism because it is not that it's not here already. When we talk about voting for democracy, this is about losing our democracy. Well, that's a very relative term. I mean, the country was not founded democratically, this country was taken. I think that's why we have such a hard time dealing with Palestine. If we have to acknowledge colonization and genocide and all of the injustices there, we might have to then look at our own situation and history. So I mean, again, it just travels back and forth between the different levels. And here in sbo, hobo is proud of its colonization and it's just terrified of losing a grip. So I think we are in an identity crisis. You can't imagine.  Speaker 3 (19:28):Yeah, I think that's right. And I think a lot of that identity, I think a lot of it is where racism really flowers is people are afraid that they lose their privilege and entitlement of being white, and then they're willing to listen to and be convinced by really horrible racist ideas. And I think part of that is also this crisis of a sense of belonging that people have been, the social institutions that used to keep us connected have withered away in so many different ways. And then during Covid, we were so isolated, and then people just got this, it's a psychological trauma of a kind to be that isolated. And so without a sense of belonging, instead of turning to one another and saying, let's figure out how we rebuild our community in ways that are real and authentic and empowering, people are turning against each other because that's sort of the reptilian brain taking over and saying fight or flight, and I'm going to fight these other, and that's going to give me a sense of belonging because then I'll be part of this little group that all is fighting against the other. So I do feel like it's an incredibly dangerous time. And I also feel like at a local level, there are solutions that are about building that sense of belonging that are within our reach.  Speaker 1 (21:12):Yeah, one thing I think from a psychological perspective is often we're like toddlers or babies. We do this process of, we do split a split, what's good, what's bad? And we're dependent on a caregiver to make meaning of the world for us so we can understand those splits and we can become hopefully an integrated adult that's able to manage the good and the bad feelings. And I think an more general term, which it's going to shortcut some understanding here, it's far more nuanced than what I'm saying, but we have a collective split. And in that collective split, for instance, when a toddler can't get their bad feelings out, if you've ever seen a toddler rage, they rage about a candy wrapper, they rage about, I can't get it. X. And what does that toddler need? Yes, they need the physical containment, the love and the care and support. They need boundaries.  Speaker 1 (22:20):Then they need a parent to talk to them, even if they can't understand it either through touch or interaction or play or verbally to make sense of why they had those big feelings to normalize the big feelings. So the toddler can say, oh, I'm not weird because I had these big feelings and here's where I can put them. Here's how I can process them. And in a sense, Trump I think has capitalized on the splitting of our collective conscious. And he said, you have bad feelings and let's put 'em over here. Let's find someone to blame. So this becomes, let's externalize our bad feelings about maybe what we're coming to realize. It gets centered around a critical race theory or it gets centered around Haitian immigrants. Let's put all of our bad feelings, the things we haven't been taught to metabolize as a society and let's throw 'em over here into these people.  Speaker 1 (23:19):And because there's a lot of folks that are listening to this rhetoric, it feels good not to have to deal with our own bad feelings about ourselves. I'm just going to be honest. When I feel shame about myself, I feel horrible. I do not like that. And sometimes I deal with it well, and sometimes I don't. But I depend on other figures in my life to bring that shame to them and say like, oh, what do I do about this? I feel bad. And how do I make amends? Or maybe I can't make amends. And if you can't make amends, you also have to deal with that. So I think these authoritarians capitalize on the psychological collective consciousness of a society that doesn't often know what to do with the bad feelings. Think about Germany, think about Israel, think about, I'm trying to think about what we've done in Mexico and South America with corporations, and now all of a sudden people migrating north.  Speaker 1 (24:24):Now they're bad. So what do we do with that construction of consciousness? And I agree, Sarah, really the only way to take a piece of that elephant is to start with your friend or your neighbor and to vote for people that seem to have more space for us to organize or to continue to make meaning with our neighbor that may be very aggressive and hostile to us. I mean, the mistake is on the other side, if I vote for this radical person, they're going to eliminate that bad neighbor somehow because they're not actually trying to convert the person they think is bad. They're trying to get rid of them, expel them permanently. And what I think I'm looking for is something, what SMA talks about, resum is where do we, and I think what you guys are saying is where's that space where we may know we don't like someone, but where there's actually space to figure it out. And with an authoritarian, there's never going to be that space. They're dependent on the hate.  Speaker 4 (25:32):That's right. Go ahead, Pam. And then people want to think that if Trump just doesn't get elected, we'll be okay. We will have dodged the literal bullet in many cases. But that's not true because like you're saying, Danielle, it's the divestment of our own intolerable parts. For whatever reason, they are intolerable to us onto the others, and our system is constructed such that we have to have others. Capitalism has to have others, we have to have racism. That's what makes it work so well for the people that it works well for. I think we need a national intervention, and I think that's what we're going toward in a dark sense.  Speaker 4 (26:49):But I would hope that we could start to get ourselves moving toward a national intervention and within a more positive framework. And how do we do that? How do we do that? You're talking about the hyper-local level and with neighbors and family. And at this point, I mean, some of our neighbors want to kill us, and that's not being hyperbolic. And we know that those sentiments are out there, but the sort of signs are being flashed everywhere to intimidate others rather than to put down those weapons, whatever form they take and sit down together to find some commonalities to just bring the temperature down. Right now, so many other people have been very alienated from numerous family members over these issues and can't not bring the issue of guns into this conversation because the weaponization of our society is a huge factor. I think it's a huge factor in why many politicians, political leaders don't step up more. I think it's why they don't confront the atrocities that are happening in front of us, whether it's in other countries or it's in our own backyard. I think the arming of America has really deformed our national character, and I think that's a large part of this identity crisis.  Speaker 3 (29:11):So yeah, I think what you said earlier about this being that the authoritarian, the group that really approves of that is a minority. And even when Trump won in 2016, he won by a minority of the popular vote. And we know the electoral college system is to blame there, but we are pretty clear that he doesn't have a majority and he still may win, but he doesn't have a majority. So I think it's really important to remember that there are the violent folks who are really in favor and really relish the idea of violence, but they are a relatively small minority way more than I would've hoped, but still. So then I think a lot of our challenge is how do we work with the people that are still in the middle? And I don't mean that they don't have opinions, it's that they are struggling with the nuances.  Speaker 3 (30:08):And I think there are a lot of those people, even though they're kind of hidden from the media, but they're struggling with the nuances, they're not sure who to vote for or whether to vote. And one of the things I keep seeing is Kamala Harris and other people asking for money, which I don't understand, they raise so much money already. And what I wish Kamala Harris would ask for is, I wish you would ask us for our vote, and I wish you would ask us to talk to somebody in our family or in our friendship circle who is struggling with knowing whether to vote or not or who to vote for and ask them for their vote. And I'm not talking about uncle, so-and-so who's clearly going to vote for Trump? What I'm talking about is the person who says, well, my vote doesn't matter. Or the person who says, I can't bring myself to vote for a candidate who hasn't stood up to what's going on in Gaza. And those are things that I sympathize with. I think there are people who have intelligence and real concern who are expressing those things. One of the things I just heard about is I don't, if you remember a while, a few elections back, there was a swap the vote thing going on where you could talk to somebody in a swing state  Speaker 3 (31:35):And say, Hey, I'll vote for a third party candidate, Jill Stein or Cornell West if you'll vote, given that you're in the swing state and your vote's going to really make a difference if you'll vote for Kamala Harris. So I'm getting ready to do that. I'm going to see if I can find one of my friends at Michigan who is struggling with that question around Gaza because I struggle with it too. And I think that Kamala Harris has shown she actually cares, even though we're not getting the kind of position we would like, I think she actually does care about human beings. I don't see any evidence of that from Trump. So I think we're better off if she wins in Gaza, we're better off with Gaza, and then we can continue our organizing work. So much of our work is really not about the elections.  Speaker 3 (32:27):It's about building the power of ordinary people through social movements. And that's what we need to be about. And that's also, I think the part besides the crisis of the other part of the crisis we're in is this crisis of inequality and hopelessness in a sense that no matter what I do, if I'm a young person, I may never be able to buy a house, or I may never be able to have children because I can't afford daycare. I mean, the death that people and people in the media, often the Democratic party often describe this as inflation and say, well, inflation is so much better, and therefore, why aren't you guys happy? It's like, well, I still can't afford a place to live. Why should I be happy? They're kind of not getting that. So the whole way our economy is functioning to pour huge amounts of money into the military industrial complex and into a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, and to allow the wealth to trickle up, not just trickle, but flow up to the top tiniest percentage and the rest of people to be struggling.  Speaker 3 (33:36):That whole way of organizing the economy I think is really important to remember how popular Bernie Sanders was when he was willing to call that out. And I think the Democratic Party was not having it. They kept him from actually winning the nomination, but he won enormous amounts of support. And some of those people were people that then turned around and voted for Trump. They wanted an outsider who was going to shake things up. I think we have to be ready to shake things up in terms of the economy in a way that's inclusive, that says we can have an economy that includes everyone, where everybody has an opportunity and not, we could have a better economy by deporting massive numbers of people. I think when you can have a political message, that's also an inclusive message and also a message of belonging, I think that's where we have an opportunity to actually combat this authoritarian bent.  Speaker 4 (34:36):I would add that we need more than messaging. We need action because the Democratic Party has been very good at messaging, inclusivity, the big tent, economic equity, healthcare. But then we look at what happens. And Sarah, you and I have been in this for decades, and we make just enough progress to keep the populace from exploding. I mean, one of the best educations, best parts of my political education was taking the training with cell deaf. Do you know them? Community Environmental Defense Fund? Yeah. Oh my God. So every election cycle, we hear the same songs. The Republicans say, well, we need to get the government out of our lives. We need to deregulate. We don't need these people. The government telling us what to do. We need to tell the government what to do. And then we hear the Democrats saying, yes, we need to make things equal and better for everybody, and we will be your guardians.  Speaker 4 (36:23):And over these decades, we have seen some progress, but really not enough. I mean, when you're talking about Bernie Sanders, I'm thinking about when I was a delegate in Philadelphia, a national delegate at the Democratic Convention. And the last night of the convention, which was when Hillary was being, oh, she'd already been nominated but finalized, and I was the whip for the Sanders delegates in the Washington state contingent. And they sent being the Democratic Committee, national Committee, they put a detail of seven plain clothes. I've got pictures and everything of this plain clothes, secret service, FBIA, and then the local law enforcement figures armed to encircle me. We had delegates from other Bernie delegates from other states who were also organized to express our democratic voices. But I think our faith in the system really needs a deep examination, and we need other parties. And the electoral college is its own thing, but this identity crisis has so many dimensions to it that the work that we have in front of us is very broad. And I'm not sure that the public in general understands that. I think they think it's about electing someone, putting them there, and then back to business as usual. And we can't go on like this. So in a way, even though it's so painful, it's so frightening, and it's so awful. I we're at a turning point, and that's a good thing. Unfortunately it doesn't feel very good,  Speaker 4 (39:04):But we have to do it right.  Speaker 3 (39:12):Danielle, I can jump in, but I was, I'm curious about what you think.  Speaker 1 (39:15):Well, I think it brings back to what I was asking you all about how do we see change happening in our society, both long-term and short term? And which leads me back to hearing Resum talk last year and then reading and listening to his books and some of his just Instagram reels and him talking about we got here over 400 years, and it really didn't start then either. It started with disgruntled folks over in Europe thinking the best way to do something about that was to go live in another place and then conquer that place. So it started centuries before this. And wait, how long have we been out of Jim Crow? Can anybody tell me how many years technically zero. I mean, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1950, what was it,  Speaker 3 (40:23):1967 I think, or 68. Okay.  Speaker 1 (40:28):I mean, just put that in context. You got four centuries and you got whatever drove those people to come here, grew up thinking these guys were the puritan citizens of the world that were looking for a new place. I really wasn't the case. So you got all of that, you honor, you immortalize Christopher Columbus who wrote prolifically and told stories prolifically about murder and rape and state sanctioned violence that set the tone. And this is a man we immortalized. So when I think about long-term, and I think about SMA talking about, he talks about each of us taking, when we begin to make a shift in our family, it being five generations out till that shift is maybe completed. So on some level, that makes me think we're all effed and on the other level, someone has to start it. We have to get going. And that's what I hear you all saying, like, okay, we have this huge dilemma. We are here, and I agree Sarah and Pam voting for the president. Again, you can get caught in that realm. If you vote for Trump, he's your savior. If you vote for Kamala, she's going to save us. Well, she's not going to save us.  Speaker 1 (42:05):Jill Stein can't save us, Cornell West, and I hope one of them are thinking they can, the alternatives to Trump. I fear maybe that narcissism is so deep that maybe there is some thought of that, but our people's movements, the things we do on our block and our street matter the most, and those have the potential to make long-term effects for my kids and short-term interventions, look at what happened in the school district here. I mean, they've gone back to using common threads and other things as a foundation because of what was set decades. Was that like two decades ago? Three decades? Two, yeah, two decades. But there is a sense that when you have someone severely corrupt and empowered and dictating tone, you literally can't get anywhere,  Speaker 3 (43:05):Right? Well, I think the time horizon question is really important. We do have hundreds of years of this history. We should remember that some of the people who came over came over because they were fleeing horrific conditions. I mean, you think about the Irish people who were trying to escape a famine, and you think about Jewish people trying to get away from pilgrims. I mean, it wasn't that everybody who came over to the US came over here because they thought they could kill a bunch of native people and therefore have a good life. I don't think that was the intent. What they did when they came over here varies tremendously. So I just think we want to keep the nuance in the story because part of the reason is because that's part of what we have to build on, is that today's refugees are not that different in many cases from the people who are escaping the Irish potato famine.  Speaker 3 (44:09):They're people who are suffering and looking for a way to survive and raise their families and work hard. And so we have that part of our story to build on too. So that's just one part. A second thing is that I think our social movements in the United States have gotten kind of swallowed up by the nonprofit industrial. We've thought we could get the changes we need and alleviate suffering by service providing within the current system. And part of the reason that that has been dominant within the nonprofit sector is because where the funding comes from, funding comes from very wealthy individuals and companies, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases want to or are willing to alleviate suffering, but they want to make sure the system stays intact, the system that continues to distribute wealth and power to a small sector of the population. Well, a social movement that is hobbled by having to stay within the existing mindset and the existing system can't be, can't take on the fundamental challenge of inequality and of extractive capitalism because it's too tied into it.  Speaker 3 (45:37):So social movements have got to become independent. And there are good examples out there. I've mentioned the working families party before. I'm not a member of it, but I'm a big admirer because they insist on independent power based on their membership. They will help a Democrat, for example, get elected, but then they'll hold that person accountable to their agenda and say, these are the things we will only endorse you if you do these, if you commit to these things, then they'll go out and work for 'em and help 'em get elected, and then they'll come back and say, did you do those things? And they'll check their record. So they're building a form of independent power. They're not the only one, but they're a good example of how, instead of just saying, okay, democratic Party will come out and we'll vote for your candidate. I mean voting, I think we should all vote. I think we should all vote. I think honestly, that we should vote to keep Trump out of power. And that means voting strategically, and that means voting for Harris.  Speaker 3 (46:34):But that doesn't have to be the focus of our work. The focus of our work should be on building independent power that then holds the candidates accountable to us and does a bunch more in terms of building power. But that's just one of the ways that we need to be building power, is by having the wherewithal to be able to hold candidates accountable to our agenda. I mean, one of the things I used to do when I was at Yes magazine is around election season, we would put together a people's agenda. And this was an agenda of what do ordinary people want? And we figured that out, not just by what we wanted, but what the polls were seeing. And we could find things like a majority of large majority of Americans wanted nationalized healthcare. There was a poll that actually asked them that, and it was way over 50%. Neither democratic nor Republican parties were willing to talk about that. And before Obamacare, when they were working under Clinton on healthcare reform, they excluded any of the single payer advocates from the room. They wouldn't even let them be in the conversation. So one thing after another or that people want reasonable gun control laws, they want reproductive freedoms. They want us to convert energy from fossil fuels to renewables. They wanted that for decades. I can tell you, I was doing this work 20 years ago and the polling numbers showed it. So we need to do more to say this is a people's agenda. This is a people's agenda locally who can represent us and carry this forward and statewide and nationally. This is what we, the people want,  Speaker 1 (48:23):Pam.  Speaker 4 (48:26):Yeah, and we need imagination. I think we're so conditioned to accept systems and there's structures that our default is just, oh, whatever that system says, this is how we do things. And Sarah's talking about movements that are outside largely of those systems, at least in terms of analyzing what works for us and what works against us. And of course, we can't be just isolated satellites. We exist within these systems. So it's the nuanced little travels back and forth. I think that will, well, we've seen it. I mean, take the school district. That was an enormous breakthrough. Huge. Huge. It works. Some of the tactics involved a lot of imagination.  Speaker 1 (49:56):Yeah, I was going to say that. I said, I think we have to realize and understand, I think you're naming this, that people are vastly ambivalent. And so both in the way we think, and I think the way our trauma has hit us as a society and personally, and so I think a lot of us want to engage new forms of organizing or being together as a community. And I think a lot of times at the same time, people aren't ready to do so. There's some comfort in doing it the old way. So I just think we're up against, we have to realize that we're in this complex social movement where we're both invited to understand and know where we came from. And like Sarah, you pointed out the nuance of how we got here. It's not just one story or the other story, but we're also comfortable, I think on both sides of the coin, whether you're liberal or conservative, there's a similarity and you're comfortable and holding that type binary.  Speaker 3 (51:06):You're comfortable, but you're also afraid, right? I mean, we get into the reptilian mindset because we feel so under attack, and then we go into our more simple way of thinking. And I think the other side that we need to be doing our best to work on is to soothe our own alarm and fear by supporting one another, but then by opening that up so that more and more people can have that sense of possibility and belonging and joy and celebration and all the things that can happen at a community level that start calming people's anxiety and giving them a sense of hope and giving them the sense that we as a community have possibilities and can exercise our imaginative power and can make things different because we actually can when we're together in a way that we really can't on our own.  Speaker 1 (52:07):Pam, now that we solve that problem,  Speaker 3 (52:17):Yay, let's go and vote.  Speaker 1 (52:24):I didn't. I mean, I think the temptation is to try to wrap it up, but we just can't, to be honest. This is a conversation that hopefully not just for a podcast, but hopefully it's ongoing with people in our actual proximity.  Speaker 4 (52:42):Well, for one thing, the election isn't going to be decided on November the fifth. I mean, this is probably going to be the longest election ever, at least in this country. So I think it's important to have our communities know that we are paying attention and we are present especially, I mean, did you see the day that, I think it was a couple days ago when Trump gave that rally and made all of those disgusting remarks about Arnold Palmer and so forth? The thing that I think really fueled him for that was that just before that rally, 49 of 67 county sheriffs in Pennsylvania met with him to endorse the Trump presidency. And so when we put that together with things like the pre-positioned fake electors and all of the mechanics that go into our electoral process, I think it's going to be a while. Until this is settled, the outcome is settled, and I think it's important for us to have a presence based in peace and non-violence and tolerance. And I think it's really going to test us.  Speaker 3 (54:52):I agree with you. I think it's going to be really tough in the swing states. I mean, luckily for Washington, I think we'll probably be less in the crosshairs, but I do agree it's going to be really tough. And four years ago, I was on the board of Free Speech tv. I'm still on the board, but I was doing a bunch of research for them to find local people in each of the swing states that they could interview to find out what was going on on the ground. Because I just felt like anybody who thinks that Trump is going to give way to peacefully to a victory on the other side is kidding themselves. He's made clear. He made clear then. But he really is made clear now, and I think because of January 6th, there's more awareness now that we really have to have some safeguards in place. I don't know that they're in place, but there's more awareness of that. So yeah, I think it's a really frightening prospect. And I agree with you, Pam, that being ready to hold each other up is going to be really important.  Speaker 5 (56:05):I feel like it's really hard not to villainize the people I come in contact with who vote the other way. The tension is really hard to hold. How do I take a strong stance for what I believe in without hating the people around me who disagree, especially if they hold contempt for me? And what I think a few months ago on a local neighborhood Facebook group, someone posted, she was asking a question of where she could get a yard sign for what's the non-majority party here? The post caught my eye and I debated whether I should check it out to see the 50 plus comments. But ultimately, my curiosity won and I scrolled through them to see insole after insole hurled at this woman, her gender, her intelligence, and even her spirituality all came under attack, all because she asked the question. Others told her she should have known better than to bring it up in the first place.  Speaker 5 (57:00):I have to confess, I thought the same thing. There have been moments I've considered putting a sign up in my own yard again for the party that is not the majority here, but when I consider the community challenges I've faced over the last few years, I shy away from doing it. I don't know if I could handle any more loss of community. I need people in my life. We all do. And there's not only the risk of losing potential neighborhood friends, there's also the risk of losing family. Last week as I pulled around to the back of my parents' home, the home where I grew up, I noticed a yard sign for the candidate I do not support, almost as if it was there just for me to see in a family that loves to talk about politics, as long as you agree, I am no longer invited, or do I desire to be a part of the conversations.  Speaker 5 (57:49):But the sign in the backyard, which couldn't be seen from the road was placed there only for family to see. It's a statement, a line in the sand. I tell my kids as they ask questions about the fact that me and their grandparents disagree that it's one of the greatest, most beautiful things about our country, that we get to have our own opinion on who we want to vote for, and that it's okay to disagree that we can love people who think differently than we do. I should probably also tell them at some point that sometimes that's really hard to do. It's hard for me to breathe and ground when the hair stands up on the back of my neck and I feel my fist clench when men at the kitchen and my office building laugh and told lies about the candidate I support knowing where I stand. It's hard to stay calm when my middle aged client throws out her party's buzzwords to test me, but I try to remember her humanity. I try to remember that her views are built by reporting that is insulated and circular, and that she's being told that she should be really afraid, and she is. And fear can make any of us want to fight. We're all only human.  Danielle (59:05):Thank you for listening to this episode of The Arise Podcast, conversations on Faith, race, justice, gender in the Church. I want to thank all of our contributors. They've done this as volunteers. I'm a volunteer. This has got started off all volunteer work and so appreciative of those who have joined our podcast. Please download, please subscribe, and please remember that we are part of the human race and to treat each other with kindness and respect.   Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.

  Contributors are listed here: Danielle S. Castillejo (Rueb), Cyon Edgerton, Rachael Reese, Chasity Malatesta, Debby Haase, Kim Frasier, Briana Cardenas, Holly Christy, Clare Menard, Marjorie Long, Cristi McCorkle, Terri Schumaker, Diana Frazier, Eliza Cortes Bast, Tracy Johnson, Sarah Van Gelder, Marwan, and more Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. You'll notice there's going to be some updated changes and different voices on the podcast this season. It's season five. It's October 1st, 2024. I haven't recorded a podcast since June of 2023, and at that time, if you've been following along in my town in Kitsap County, we were working through what would prove to be an extensive and prove to be an extensive fight for justice in our school district. And at this time, we have made some very significant shifts. I want to get into this episode to kind of catch you up on where I'm at, where the podcast is at, and hopefully as you listen to myself and some different voices on these upcoming podcasts, you understand that we have this fundamental common theme amongst us, which is our humanity. And when we drop down into that humanity, because our work, our lives, our families, there's all these poles and all these different ways for us to separate ourselves from our humanness and be busy or accomplish this or accomplish that.(00:01:52):And I know because I'm in there too, we actually separate ourselves from our neighbor. And so I'm hoping as we engage tough topics of politics and we get into the sticky points of it, that there's a sense that, yeah, I don't agree with that person or I agree with that person, but there is a sense that there is shared humanity. And so as we talk about these different subjects, I wanted to emphasize that first, an article was released in the fall last year saying in September of 2023 saying that there was, the school district's investigation had concluded and they had deemed that there was no racism in the North Kitsap School district. As you can imagine, a report like that on the front page of the paper, after all we'd been through after sitting through numerous hours of meetings listening to families and their experiences was disheartening.(00:02:45):We came to find out that some of the families felt or experienced what they deemed to be threatening tones from the investigators or understood that they could possibly be under penalty of perjury depending on what they answered. And I'm not saying that this was always the case, but the threat was on the table. And when you're dealing with working with majority world peoples who are marginalized in the United States, that threat can be very real. And the impact of it is very great. So I began to understand that this investigation wasn't actually looking for the truth and how to solve the problem. It was actually looking for a way of complete and utter defense against what these families had reported their students had experienced. It's a very different thing. And I think there were rumors like were these families going to sue the district, bring a lawsuit to the district?(00:03:41):And we've seen in neighboring school districts, just in recent times, lawsuits have been filed for much less. I mean, we had 90 original complaints. We have more people that had come forward as time had moved on. And yet there was never a move to actually file a lawsuit. We didn't file a lawsuit. We continued to move forward with our lives and think about our students. I think at some point in last fall of 2023, there was just a sense of deep despair like we put in years of effort. And the result was this report that basically attempted to delegitimize all the stories of all these families. It was horrible and heartbreaking and followed the fall. And in the late winter there was going to be a vote for this school bond. And as the yes for the bond campaign rolled out, led by a committee of yes folks, which included some Paul's Bowl rotary members and then the superintendent, it became clear to different community members that there were a lot of questions still to be asked, a lot of information we wanted to have and a lot of things that just felt like they were missing.(00:04:57):I'm not saying they were all missing, but there were pieces and details that appeared to be missing. And when we asked the questions similar to what happened with the complaints, we didn't get answers. The answers were couched in long paragraphs or explanations, and the architects seemed like they didn't have access to the buildings. Again, we didn't know all the details of what happened. And this is just a general recap. You can look at the ensuing political drama online. If you Google superintendent signs and polls Bowl, Washington, P-O-U-L-S-B-O Washington, you will find articles on NBC to Fox News to video clips, all of the above. There were signs all over our county, as I'm sure in your different counties or if you live in Kitsap, you've seen them political signs, vote yes on the bond, vote no on the bond, et cetera. And it appeared that signs were going missing.(00:06:02):And in one case, the signs were going missing often in one particular location and a pair of folks who are not married who became allied because they were both against the bond and had been putting up no on bond signs, decided to put up a wildlife cam and we're able to capture a person destroying the signs on video. And again, Google sbo, Google signs, Google Superintendent look for February 20, 24 articles and you'll see the ensuing reports of what happened. This became a chance for us actually to revisit our story because there's a theme of dishonesty from the top leadership. There was a theme of hiding. There's a theme of not giving all the information a theme of there's any extent we can go to that bumps up against the law. By the way, I think it's against the law to destroy political signs. So there's just this theme that you could break the law and get away with it.(00:07:08):We've seen in the top politics of our country down to the low level politics of our country. And what was our community going to do with all of this? We rallied together. For the first time in many years, there were literally hundreds of people on a zoom call for a school board meeting. News agencies showed up again, and sadly, our district was in the news for something else negative related to the top leadership. And it was very sad. The process. The superintendent was put on leave and resigned in June, but stopped working essentially closely with the school board. I think it was in March or April of 2024. I just remember that when the harm stops, when someone harmful is told by law enforcement or the law or someone else in a higher power to stop harming it, it's a relief. But also that's the time when all of the residual trauma sets in the trauma that you've been going through to be in proximity to someone in leadership and you're literally powerless to address it.(00:08:19):And I guess I bring this up to say that as we think about politics nationally, locally, whether it's a school board member or a president, I remember feeling challenged When I live in a small town, paulville was a small town. It is not like Seattle size. It's like got rural folks. There's folks that commute into the city of Seattle. We're, we're a mix of all different kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds. Our school district is now 38% Spanish speaking this year. There is a genuine mix. So when you're out and about in this small container, Kitsap's also very small too. It's rural, it's small. We're kind of contained on our own peninsula. When you're in this environment, the chances that you're going to see someone that you're know are really high, it's not like if you hate someone about, you're not going to run into Donald Trump here.(00:09:11):You're not going to run in here, run into Kamala Harris here. It's not like you're running into those folks, but you might run into your representative. You might run into the school board member from this district or another district. And how are you going to see that person that actually you not only disagree with, but you felt has been unjust to you? Costs a lot. I mean, money's one thing, but time, effort, family, reputation, allies, there is so much time involved and the way forward. You think it's clear when you're fighting on behalf of kids, you're advocating on behalf of kids. That feels really good. But the process to work through that advocacy often doesn't feel that great. You have to become allies with people you don't agree with. And so I think that just brings me back to where do we find our common humanity?(00:10:06):Where do we find space to occupy a same piece of land or a same meeting or a similar, we have similar causes, but maybe there's deep hurt between us and maybe that hurt is to the point where we're not going to ever talk to that person again, and how do we still see them as human? How do we still see them as valuable in this world? How do we still gain compassion? Those are things I ask myself and I don't have the answers. So I've included a number of folks asking a similar questions about humanness, about politics, about where they locate themselves in their various positions, their race, ethnicity, et cetera, and how do they come at this? And I hope you enjoy the following conversations because I conversations or talks from these people, commentary from these people as we hear all different perspectives. Now you may hear someone and be like, I can get down with that. I agree with that. And then there's another person you might be like, no way, no effing way. And so I encourage you to listen, stay curious with yourself and have talks with your family about how you're going to engage this political season.Speaker 2 (00:11:26):Danielle asked me how I see being human in the age of politics, and I'm struggling answering this because A, I am not a politician or have really any experience as a politician. I have experience as a community based organizer. So I am speaking on this on the outside of things. And then also I'm a white woman able bo, heterosexual woman. And the politics and the systems of power were built for me as a white person to thrive. And so I just want to locate myself in that because my view is of a privileged view. White folks can step in and out of politics without it really harming us. And that's a problem, obviously, and it distorts our view of politics.(00:12:55):But with this question, I have become more and more angry and upset with politics, policies, systems of power, the more that I unlearn and learn about my internal white supremacy culture and ways of being. And as the genocide in Palestine and other countries continue, I don't think the political structures are here for us. They're not people centered, they're not community centered. I think all politics are really about power. And so as an outsider, as not a politician and as a white woman, so those are flawed views. I'm coming from a flawed view. I see how politics change people or they make bad people even worse. I know local white folks that are in it for power and just continue on searching for more and more power. And I've witnessed community organizers join politics to really try to change the systems. But I don't think politics or the system was made to help humans. I don't think the system is for humans. And it hurts people, it divides people. I don't really know how to answer this question because I don't think politics and humanists can actually go together, not the way that they're set up now.Speaker 3 (00:15:09):These questions are so beautiful and just so right on time for this time, we're in right before an election where there's so much stress. My name is Sara Van Gelder and I am a friend of Danielle's and a resident of Kitsap County for many years have I was one of the founders of YES magazine. I also founded a group called People's Hub, which teaches community folks how to do local organizing, actually peer to peer teaching. I didn't do the teaching, but connected people together to teach each other and been associated as a ally of the Suquamish tribe at various times in my life, but I did not ever speak for them.(00:15:54):So my own humanity in the context of this political moment, I like to stay in a place of fierce love and do when I can. I can't say I'm always there. I'm often triggered. I often go into a place of feeling really fearful and anxious about what's going on in the world and more particularly the polarization and the rise of which what I don't like to call, but I think is actually a form of fascism. And when I talk about fierce, it means being willing to say the truth as I see it, but also love, which is that that is the motivator. I don't like seeing people get hurt and I'm willing to stand up and be one of the people to say what I see, but not in a way that is intended to degrade anybody. I am a mother, I'm a grandmother, I'm a daughter, I'm a sister. And being connected to people through love and that sense of willingness to protect one another, that's at the core. So even if I disagree with you, I'm not going to wish you harm.Speaker 1 (00:17:12):Wow. Wow. Even if I disagree with you, I'm not going to wish you harm. And I think what I've heard just particularly lately around the talk of immigration, let's say for an example, is the talk about immigration in the context of a particular city. For instance, they've used Springfield, Ohio over and over. It's come up many times and the demonization, the dehumanization of those immigrants, the miscategorizing of their status, it seems like some of this can get point hyper-focused on one particular example to make a political point or to drive fear home across different context, different communities. So when you think about that, do you wish those people harm that are making those accusations? How do you engage a tough subject like that?Speaker 3 (00:18:15):Yeah, it's a really hard one, and I could tell you what I aspire to do and what I actually do a lot of times is avoid people who have that level of disagreement with, because I'm not sure I have enough in common to even have a good conversation. So I don't feel like I'm as good at this as I'd like to be. But what I try to do is to first off, to recognize that when we're in the fight or flight sort of reptilian brain, when we're super triggered, we have the least capacity to do good work of any kind. So I try to get out of that mindset, and in part I do that by trying to listen, by trying to be an active listener and try to listen not just for the positions. The positions are ones that will likely trigger me, but to listen for what's beneath the positions, what is somebody yearning for?(00:19:10):What is it that they're really longing for beneath those positions that I find so harmful and so triggering. So in many cases, I think what people are looking for in this immigration debate is a sense of belonging. They want to believe that their community is a place where they belong and somehow believe that having other people who are from different cultures move in reduces the chances that they'll be able to belong. So what would it mean if they could feel like they belonged along with the Haitians in their community that it didn't have to be an either or is there a way to have that kind of conversation that what if we all belong(00:19:54):In that respect? The thing that I am sometimes most tempted to do, which is to cancel someone, if you will, that actually feeds into that dynamic of not belonging because I'm telling that person also, you don't belong in my life. You don't belong in my community. So it's not easy to do, but I do feel like we have a better chance of doing that locally than we have doing it nationally because locally we do have so many things we have in common. We all want to drink clean water, we want clean air. We want places our kids can go to school where they will belong and they will feel good. So if we can switch the conversation over to those deeper questions, and I think one thing I've learned from hanging out with indigenous folks is the way in which they think about the seven generations and how much more expansive of you that can give to you when you think that way.(00:20:54):Because instead of thinking about again, that immediate threat, that immediate personal sense of anxiety, you start thinking, well, what's going to work for my kids and my grandkids? I don't want them to be experiencing this. Well, that means something about having to learn how to get along with other people, and we want our kids to get along with each other. We want them to have friends and family, and when they marry into a different culture, we want to feel good about our in-laws. I mean, we want our neighborhood to be a place where our kids can run around and play outside. I mean, there's so many things that once you start expanding the scope to other generations, it makes it so clear that we don't want that kind of society that's full of hate and anxiety.Speaker 1 (00:21:44):Wow, seven generations. It is true. I do a lot of reading and I think about res, are you familiar with Resa and my grandmother's hands? And he talks about that the shifts we want to make in society, the shifts towards being more in our actual physical bodies and present with one another and the reps that it takes, the way we're disrupting it now to make a dent in the 400 plus year history of slavery and the act of embodying ourselves from the harm that has been done is going to take five to seven generations. It's not that he's not for change now. He absolutely is. And just having that long term, almost like marathon view perspective on what change has either for ourselves that can give ourselves grace and that we can also give others in our proximity grace, while also not engaging in active harm. I think there's an important part there. Does that make sense?Speaker 3 (00:22:51):Oh, it makes so much sense. And it's like that long-term view doesn't suggest we can put off working. It only even happens in the long term if we start today, we take the first steps today. So yes, absolutely makes sense. I'm not sure I'm patient enough to wait for all those generations, but I want to be keeping them in my mind and heart when I act. How is this going to contribute to their possibilities? So part of that is by thinking about these questions of belonging, but it's also questions of exclusion more structurally. I think the fact that our society has such deep exclusion economically of so many people, there's so many people across the board who feel so precarious in their lives. I think that sets us up for that kind of scapegoating because ideally what we'd be saying is, if you can't afford to go to college, if you can't afford a medical bill, if you can't afford a place to rent, there's a problem with our economy.(00:23:56):Let's look at that problem with our economy and do something about it. And I believe people have gotten so disempowered. So feeling that that's beyond them to do that. Then the next thing that the demagogues will do is say, well, let's look for a scapegoat then. Let's look for a scapegoat of somebody who's less powerful than you and let's blame them because that'll give you a temporary sense of having power. And that's how, I mean it's not unique to our situation. It's how fascism so often unfolds and how historically groups have been scapegoated. And I think we need to turn our attention back to what is the real cause of our anxiety. And I think the real cause of our anxiety is economic and political disfranchisement. Once we can actually tackle those topics, we can see how much more we can do when we work together across all isms and make things happen for a world in which everyone has a place.Speaker 1 (00:24:55):So then if you know people in your sphere, let's say, and don't name them here, that border on the narrative that says, if you disenfranchise someone less powerful than you, that will bring you some relief. If you have people like that in your life, Sarah, how do you approach them? How do you engage with them if you're willing to share any personal experience?Speaker 3 (00:25:28):Yeah, so my biggest personal experience with that was working as an activist alongside the Suquamish tribe when a lot of their immediate neighbors were trying to keep them from building housing, keep them from building relationships with other governments and actually took them to court trying to actually end their sovereign right to be a tribe. So that was my most direct involvement and that was 20 years ago. So it seems like ancient history, but I learned a lot from that, including from working with tribal elders who provided a lot of leadership for us and how we should work. And one of the things that I've learned from that and also from being a Quaker, is that the notion of how you talk to people in a nonviolent way, and a lot of that starts with using I statements. So when people in my neighborhood would say really disparaging things about the tribe, I would respond with, I feel this. I believe the tribe has sovereign rights. I believe they have always been here and have the right to govern themselves and build homes for their members. And it's harder, it's not as triggering when somebody says, I instead of starts with a word(00:26:58):When somebody says, you immediately have this responsive defensiveness because it's unclear what's going to come next and whether you're going to have to defend yourself when you say I, you're standing in your own power and your own belief system and you're offering that to someone else with the hope that they might empathize and perhaps even perhaps be convinced by part of what you have to say. But in the meantime, you haven't triggered a worsening of relationships. And one of the things I really didn't want to do was create anything that would further the violence, verbal most cases, violence against the tribe, sort of getting people even further triggered. So it was just really important to always be looking for ways to be very clear and uncompromising on really important values, but be willing to compromise on ones that were not important. So for example, when we were working on getting the land return to the tribe that had been a state park, we asked people what's important to you about how this park functions in the future? Because the tribe can take that into account they, but the idea that it is their land, the home of chief Seattles, that was not something we could compromise on.Speaker 1 (00:28:17):I love that using I statements intentionally checking in with yourself so you're not engaging in behaviors that trigger another person further into more defensive mode. Sarah, what are some resources or recommendations you could leave with me or us? When you think about engaging people and staying very present, it's a very human stance to say, I think I believe this versus an accusatory tone like you are this, you are that.Speaker 3 (00:28:50):I think the nonviolent communication that Marshall Rosenberg developed is very powerful. He has a very specific technique for having those kinds of conversations that are very focused on that notion about the I statement and also reflecting back what you hear from other people, but then being willing to use statements about what I need because saying that puts me in a position of being vulnerable, right? Saying I actually need something from you. You obviously have the choice of whether you're going to give it to me or not, but I need to be in a place where I can feel safe when we have these conversations. I need to feel like I live in a community where people are so then the other person has that choice, but you're letting them know and you're again standing in your own power as somebody who's self-aware enough, it also invites them to be self-aware of what they need.Speaker 1 (00:29:46):I love that. Yeah, keep going.Speaker 3 (00:29:50):I think there are other resources out there. I'm just not calling 'em to mind right now, but I think nonviolent communications is a really good one.Speaker 1 (00:29:58):And locally, since you talked locally, what are maybe one or two things locally that you regularly engage in to kind of keep up your awareness to keep yourself in a compassionate mode? How do you do that for youSpeaker 3 (00:30:16):Being out in nature? Okay,Speaker 1 (00:30:19):Tell me about that.Speaker 3 (00:30:22):Oh, in Japan, they call it forest bathing, but it's just a fancy term for being in some places it's really natural. There's beautiful walks. We're very fortunate here in the northwest that there are so many beautiful places we can walk. And when you're surrounded by preferably really intact ecosystems where you can feel the interactions going on among the critters and the plants and just let that wash over you because part of that as well, it kind of helps take some of the pressure off. It sort of releases some of us being kind of entangled in our own ego and lets us just have greater awareness that we're actually entangled in this much larger universe. It's much, much older and we'll go on way after we're gone and extends to so many different ways of being from a bird to a tree, to a plate of grass, and we're all related.Speaker 4 (00:31:33):Hey, this is Kim. So just a brief background. I am a 41-year-old biracial woman. I am a mom, a nurse, a child of an immigrant, and I identify as a Christian American. Thanks Danielle for asking me to chime in. I just wanted to touch base on this current political climate. I would say as a liberal woman, I really enjoy diversity and hearing and seeing different perspectives and engaging in meaningful conversation. Unfortunately, I feel like right now we are so polarized as a country and it's not like the air quote, good old days where you could vote for a politician that you felt like really represented your ideals and kind of financially what you value, policies, et cetera. Now I feel like it has become really a competition and an election of human rights, and I think for me, that's kind of where I draw my own personal boundary.(00:32:40):I think it's important to share different perspectives, and I think I do have a unique perspective and I enjoy hearing others' perspectives as well, but for me, I do draw the line at human rights. So I have learned over the years to just not engage when it comes to issues of individuals being able to choose what to do with their body, women in particular, it's terrifying to me as a nurse and a woman and a mother of a daughter who could potentially be in a situation at some point and not be allowed to make choices about her own body with a doctor. Also as the child of an immigrant, I was raised by a white mother, Irish German Catholic, and my father is an immigrant that has been here since 19 76, 77. He is from Trinidad and Tobago. He's actually served in the military and I have a hard time with vilifying people of color trying to come to this country and make a better life for themselves and for their future and their future generations, which is exactly what my dad was doing. So to me, it's a no-brainer, right? Not to tell anybody what to do or how to vote, but I think that it's really hard right now to hold space for individuals who may be attacking my rights as a woman, my ability as a nurse to be able to care for patients and really what this country was supposedly built on, which is being a melting pot and allowing any and everyone here to be able to pursue the American dream and make a life for themselves and their loved ones.Speaker 5 (00:34:34):As soon as the topic turns to politics, I feel myself cringe, and then I want to internally retreat a bit. Looking back over the past eight plus years, I realize I have been feeling like this for a long time. My body holds memories of heated, uncomfortable confrontive distancing and sometimes horrifying conversations with friends and at times, even with family, I'm tired as most people tired from the collective traumas. We have all lived through political, racial, and pandemic related. Eight years ago, I think I worked to try and remain objective. I told myself that my job was just to hear the other person with curiosity, but doing that was not enough to help me stay well in the midst of what I truly could not then and cannot still control. I've come to realize that I have to stay connected to my own feelings, to my own limitations.(00:35:37):I have to make space to feel my disappointment, my disgust, my fear, my sadness, my powerlessness, my ache, even my longing still when it comes to the realm of politics, I have to make room for my own humanity and then I have to be willing to share that, not simply be a listening ear for others. What's been most difficult for me as politics has driven division and disconnection is the loss of healthy dialogue and conversation. It feels to me like relational loss is there where it doesn't seem like it always has to be. I am passionate about the table, about creating and cultivating space at a table for all the voices and for all of the stories to belong. I still believe in this, and when I'm connected to my own humanity, it makes me far more open to the humanity of another, knowing my own stories that are being stirred up and activated by injustice, by what I perceive to be irresponsible politicians and policies that don't make sense to me and at times scare me when I'm in the presence of those who hold very different political views from me.(00:37:02):I have to actively choose to not just tolerate listening to them, but instead to try and listen for something more. I try to listen for the fear that often fuels their positions. The fear is always storied and the stories offer taste of their humanity and oftentimes their experience of suffering, which always offers the opportunity for empathy. I can't do it all the time. Some situations don't afford the time for curiosity and sharing. When that happens, I need space afterwards, space to release what I don't need or want to hold that I heard space to feel my own humanity again, and then space to choose to remember the humanity of the other person, and that is all an active practice. I think that othering people into political camps and categories is easily available and every time it happens, we lose more and more of our collective humanity and we feed the machine of hate that profits from our conversational and emotional laziness.Speaker 6 (00:38:11):I can't say it's always easy, that's for sure. What I try to do is see another person, whether it's around the political views or other things that I may not agree with somebody about or I might even actually see them as a quote enemy, is for one thing, I drop into my heart and get out of my head about ideas, views, and just try to be present in my heart as much as possible with as little judgment as possible and recognize the essence of the other person, the essence that's inside all the beliefs and the views, and recognizing also that we all have some sort of wounding from our lives, maybe our lineages, our generations, maybe even past lives and or trauma, and that that can obscure the essence of who we are, and I try to really remember that essence in another person.(00:39:34):And in relation, how do you see your own humanity? The other question you ask, how do you see your own humanity in the context of political dialogue? I have to say that's not really a question I thought about. I thought about how to see the humanity in others, so I really appreciate this question. I think if I start othering the other, if I get into too much judgment, I feel like I lose my own sense of humanity or at least the type of human I hope and wish to be. What helps me to I guess, discern when I'm in my own humanity, when I'm in the best of places, I guess I don't know how else to word that is I tune into my values. What do I value most and am I living by those values in the way that I want to be human In this world, for example, for me, integrity is super important as well as respect and compassion.(00:40:44):I'm not saying I'm always in this place, but these values that I aspire to live by help bring me into my own humanity and almost like check, checking in, tuning in checkpoints in a way, when I speak about compassion, sometimes people, all of what I'm saying, I want to, even though I'm maybe trying to see the essence of someone, I do try to discern that if there's being harm done, I'm not okaying any harm at all. And when I try to live by compassion, I feel like that's when I can really see the humanity in others and compassion for myself. I view compassion as a very active verb, a little bit different than empathy. Just that compassion is seeing the suffering, but wanting to do something about it and doing something for me. Compassion includes action, and sometimes that action is helping to disrupt or interrupt harm that's happening, and that's how I can show up in my humanity for others is the best I can do is acting as well as being that balance both, andSpeaker 7 (00:42:23):I'm Diana, she her and I didn't use to see myself in politics the way that I do now. It took decades for me to really start to get a grasp about who I actually am and how the ways I view politics, the ways I vote, who I support, how it actually affects me, and I spent a lot of years voting for things that hurt me without even realizing I was doing that because I was following the messaging and believing it. Ultimately that being a good fill in the blanks meant voting for fill in the blanks or being a good fill in the blanks meant donating to or supporting or whatever, fill in the blanks. And I hurt myself by doing that because I wasn't listening to my own knowing or my own intuition or looking in the mirror at who am I? What kind of world do I want to live in? I didn't ask myself those questions. I did what I thought I was supposed to do to fall in line, and there were people in my life during that who spoke truth, and it was true because it was individual to them. It was, here's what I know about me and here's what this policy means for me. And I didn't get it. I certainly didn't get it.(00:44:09):I judged it inside my own head, and yet those people who spoke their own individual truth are the people who were able to shed light through the cracks in my facade. And years later, I remember some of the things that people said or that they posted or whatever because those were the light that I saw through the cracks and it was so memorable, even though at the time I might have been irritated by it, it was memorable because I loved and respected these people and so their words didn't matter to me, even though at the time I very much disagreed and I hope that I will be allowed to be the light in some people's cracks because I know for a fact there's so many people like me who haven't actually looked at who they are, what they want, what kind of world do they want to live in if they separate themselves from the ideology of where they work or where they go to church or their family of origin or what their spouse is telling them, no honey, who are you? What do you want? And when people can be brave enough to do that, its everything up.Speaker 8 (00:45:46):My name is Marwan Cameron, and I was asked to answer a couple questions here, and the first question was, how do you see your own humanity in the context of political dialogue? And I had to think about this question. Our humanity is front and center when we talk about politics primarily because the issues that affect us, meaning the black community are often sidelined or ignored. I'll share some examples of that. Democrats and Republicans both speak about healthcare, the economy crime, but when they have centered those conversations around the realities they face, when do you actually see that take reparations. For example, we hear a lot about tax cuts or healthcare reform, but nothing about reparations for chattel slavery, for foundational black Americans which are owed to black people for centuries of exploitation. You can even look at our prison system where men are going to prison without HIV and very low percentages and then coming out several times higher when they are released from jail and prison, and I'll get into some of those stats. Also.(00:47:15):When we look at black men that are falsely accused of sexual assault, unfortunately we go back to Emmett Till and we never really talk about the contemporary men. I have a list of a hundred black men that have been falsely accused in the last five years alone. Albert Owens 2023, Christian Cooper, 2020, Joshua Wood, Maurice Hastings, Jonathan Irons, 2000, Anthony Broadwater, 2021, Mark Allen, 2022, Franklin, west 2020, Michael Robertson, Shaw, Taylor, Dion, Pearson 2021, Stanley Race 2019 Rashan Weaver 2020. Henry Lee McCollum, 2020. David Johnson, Jamel Jackson, Charles Franklin, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Corey Wise, you, Celine, Aron McCray, Brian Banks, which is a pretty famous name, Wilbert Jones. That's just 20 names in the last five years of a list of a hundred that I have that have been falsely accused of sexual assault, these aren't things that we talk about. Question two, how do you make space for folks in your proximity who did not share your political views as a heterosexual black male in this country, you really have no choice but to make space for others' Political views as in question number one, we are really only allowed to speak about injustices or political needs in the framework of the black community as a whole.(00:49:25):Matter what side you find yourself on, whether you're a Republican, we're oftentimes they straight up say, we're not acknowledging what your needs are. We're not going to do anything about your needs. You can come over here and vote with us if you want. As Trump said, what have you got to lose? What have Democrats done for you? Or you can look at the democratic side where in the last three elections, it's been existential against Donald Trump. And when Donald Trump won and then lost and is running again, we still haven't seen things like the repeal of qualified immunity, things like atoning for the most heinous crimes that the United States has committed in chattel slavery against black men. I've made space. We have made space as black men in regards to those who do not share our political views. Black men have fought in every war for the United States of America. We have stood up, stood behind, been sacrificed for the good of almost every cause, and we're told not yet. It's not the right time. We too need, have needs, and it becomes a zero sum game.Speaker 9 (00:51:19):Growing up, we had Sunday dinners at my grandparents. Conversation was always lively with my family, talking loudly, fast, and often right over each other. We talked about everything, what was happening around us, our community, what was in the paper and on the news that evening. We didn't always agree. In fact, I think my grandparents debated opposite sides. Just for fun, I fondly remember my grandmother saying, your grandpa and I are canceling each other's votes at the polls. They would both smile and sometimes laugh. Considering my upbringing, I was surprised to hear my instructor at cosmetology school lay down the law. Politics and religion were never to be discussed, not in school, and certainly not if we wanted to be successful professionally. I learned to smile and nod. I strive to find common ground with the opinion of guests. I was raised not to look for any offense with ideas that contrasted my own.(00:52:16):It takes both a left and a right wing to make the eagle fly and what a boring world this would be in if we all agreed. But then Trump happened up until he achieved power. Generally speaking, whether the law or policy was written by conservatives, liberals, moderates, there was a basis of bettering the American way of life. To be clear, this wasn't always the advancement of protection we agreed with, but we could see the logic of it. For the most part, Trump's leadership consists of a hatred for people who are not like him. Early on in his campaign, he told Americans to police their neighbors if they were of a specific religion he has built upon dehumanization and vilification every day sense. My mother lived in Germany for a few years and a town not far from Dau. It was the early 1960s and not yet recovered from World War ii.(00:53:21):This quaint little town overlooks the Bavarian Alps with architects right out of a storybook and a stunning view of Munich. It was evidence that the residents of this charming quiet village were aware that 800,000 people came in and no one left. History books paint the picture that everyone was scared of speaking up for fear they would be next. But with critical thinking, we know many of those approved. They've been listening to the nonsense of their leaders, their beliefs that Jews, the disabled homosexuals, immigrants were a burden on the healthcare system, education system, taking their German jobs, businesses, and homes. They were demonized so strongly, so powerfully. They were no longer human, no longer their neighbors, doctors, teachers, bakers seamstresses their talents, their skills and their very humanity no longer existed. We know this to be true, but what we don't talk about is the slope that good people slid down that enabled this to take place in the coffee shops, birthday parties, sitting with friends, playing cards, Sunday family dinners, these words came up.(00:54:43):Hitler's rhetoric spread and thoughtful kind people did not correct their friends, family, guests and clients. There were Nazis and sympathizers, but there were good people that saw through Hitler's dumpster fire of lies. These are the people I wonder if they ever slept well again. Could they ever look at themselves with honor and integrity? Trump proudly uses this method. He has people willing to do his bidding. He has sympathizers, but what he doesn't have is my silence, my obedience. My voice is the born power. I have to stand strong and correct the lies he tells and the people in my circle repeat. I will lose clients and friends taking this action, and that's a price I'm willing to pay, but I'm not willing to live out the rest of my days knowing that I didn't do everything in my power to stop in.Speaker 10 (00:55:49):How do you make space for folks in your proximity who don't share your political views? I am lucky that I live next to my parents and that my mother-in-law lives in a small home on our property. For years, there was a constant strife between my parents, myself, husband, and my mother-in-law due to political and religious beliefs, uncomfortable dinners, having to watch what you say, an aura of judgment that would seem to permeate family gatherings. They were quite the norm. And each time that they would leave, I would feel a sense of relief. Sometimes someone would decide not to come or just tell us that they needed a break. This would create less tension, but I worry that someone would feel left out or that they would feel judged if they weren't present. And actually that would happen more often or not, especially in my time of anger before and during Covid.(00:56:40):As mentioned before, when I decided that I needed to focus on my own sense of happiness and live up to my values and beliefs, I decided that my home would become a politics, religion free zone. I wanted my home to be a safe for everyone. And this was a tough transition. And what was most difficult was creating boundaries for our parents, having the hard conversations about why we're asking people to withhold their opinions on politics and religion and to focus on grandkids sports and family celebrations, et cetera. For the first few months, I was constantly reminding everyone of the rule, but eventually we all seemed to settle in and even catch ourselves when we deviated from how sex expectations, dinners and events became more pleasant. And when our guests would leave, I didn't have to decompress or worry about how to fix an issue or soothe someone's feelings.(00:57:27):This one simple step has been a game changer, and it's not always perfect, and sometimes people will slip up, but instead of taking on the issue, we will move the conversation to another topic. Some would say that we need to talk about the issues and debate their merits so that we can grow and come together. But no, after finding my purpose, I don't believe that being right is more important than someone else's feelings. I want everyone who sits at my table and breaks spread with me to feel loved and valued. It's not perfect because we're human, but we're trying one dinner at a timeSpeaker 11 (00:58:03):To how do I hold my own humanity? In the context of political dialogue, one of the first things that comes to mind for me is, at least in political conversations, what defines my humanity? When I think about politics, much of our politics is really about power and privilege, of which I happen to have both. And so when I'm thinking about politics, I'm thinking about my social location as a able-bodied, middle class, heterosexual Christian White woman, I carry privilege in almost every aspect of that identity, at least here in the United States. And so when I'm thinking about humanity and political dialogue, our political system has historically always been and continues to be set up to serve people with my type of humanity very well. The thing that I'm constantly trying to keep in my mind is what about the humanity of my brothers and sisters experiencing oppression, marginalization when it comes to my voice and my vote in political situations, I have over the years had to learn to think less about how can I use my vote and my voice to engage in politics in a way that benefits me because I'm already benefiting from our system.(00:59:42):Our system is set up to benefit people like me who carry great levels of social privilege. What I really want to know as I'm trying to use my voice and my vote wisely now, is how do I leverage both of those things, my voice, my vote, as well as my power and privilege to engage in political dialogue in ways that fix broken systems. So I am oftentimes not actually voting or advocating for the things that would benefit me the most or necessarily align perfectly with my theological or political ideals. I'm looking at where are the most broken places in our system? Where is our government currently oppressing individuals the most? And how can my vote and my voice be used to leverage our politics in such a way that those broken systems begin to get fixed and healed over time so that those whose humanity looks different than mine are receiving the same amount of privilege of assistance of power that they should be.(01:00:57):And when it comes to dealing with those that I'm in proximity with who have very different political ideologies than myself, of which I will say in my current context, there are quite a few. I am constantly having to remind myself to focus on core values, values over stances that our conversations and our engagement with one another centers not so much around opinions about specific political stances or issues as much as the core values that we share. If my core value is for equality and equity, if my core value is that we're caring for the poor and the marginalized, then regardless of what stances I might have on certain issues, my voice and my vote represents those core values. And I've found that even when certain stances might be different, when we dig into the core values that are at the root of our decision-making, there's oftentimes a lot more common ground than I ever expect there to be.Speaker 12 (01:02:06):This recording is for the fabulous Danielle Castillo. I think what I am seeing right now as I think about how to welcome people's humanity and politics are a few key things that are both shocking and I would say disappointing in a day and age where we seem to want to tolerate people not being locked into binary spaces, we have relegated differences and opinion and viewpoints into a bipartisan politic. And what that does is that means that there are people who are in and who are out. And we've had to embrace things that we both love and hate if we ascribe to any one of those bipartisan objectives. And so we've had to in some ways, in our own humanity, violate pieces of ourselves to say, well, I align this part one way, but even though I categorically reject their views on this another way. And then regardless of whatever spectrum you're on inside of that political continuum, and it's hard because at that point, if we say in a lot of other spaces that there's space for nuance and there's space for gray, then why here do we land in those spaces?(01:03:16):And so that would be the first that it is an either or, and we seem to be comfortable, most comfortable that way. And then to demonize and villainize somebody who's in the either or space, instead of allowing for the gray, you're either all for me or all against me, and you can't live somewhere in the middle. The second thing that would be shocking and disappointing for me is the way that we've been able to start arranging the things that we can tolerate. And so I can say, well, I love this candidate because I love these three things and I agree with them and I hate these four things, but they're not that bad. And you love this candidate, you love the other candidate for these three things, but you hate them for those four things. And the fact that you don't hate 'em enough over those four things means that you're a terrible person.(01:04:02):And I find that just so interesting and so sad that we've been able to say, well, the four things I can stomach that I don't like are somehow more or less worse than the four things you feel like you could tolerate or not tolerate. And so my list of sins or offenses that are easily navigable, somehow I get to become the moral compass over what should be enough or not enough to disqualify somebody for public service. I think at the end of the day, what makes us hard is that we see people in the middle as somehow exhibiting some sort of cowardice. And I think we're pushing people to violate their own humanity and say, as my experience changes and as the neighborhood changes and the people around me change, and my own philosophy changes that I can't stand in a faithful middle and say, well, I agree with some of this, but I don't agree with some of that.(01:04:54):And we've called those people cowards instead of principled moderates, and we've shamed them into saying, well, you have to choose something. And I think that is so unkind. And I think really at the end of the day, we are asking people to violate their own humanity and their own understanding of who they are and their own sense of who they are as a person by saying that they have to agree one way if they want to be a human or be a woman or be a person of color or be a person of faith. And I think it's both sides. I think every side is complicit. At the end of the day, what is really hard is that I think most people want to vote for the person that is going to lead well, and they want that person to be a good person. They want them to be an upright person.(01:05:37):They want them to be an authentic person, the same person behind closed doors as they are in the public face. And I would say, I don't think that's most people who choose politicking as a vocation, I believe that so much of their job is diplomacy and having to be a lot of faces in a lot of places. And so asking for that kind of authenticity and consistency in a social media world is almost asking the impossible. I don't think it totally is impossible, but I think it's exceptionally hard. Many of the things that we want to ascribe to one individual and how they uphold or represent their own party are carefully crafted narratives by a team of people who are professional politicians and marketers, and to ask them to give you an authentic person, their job is to not give you an authentic person. Their job is to give you an avatar that you feel you can most connect with so you can make the decision they want you to make.(01:06:33):And that is really for me, the reality of what we're up against right now is that we want to say we're voting for ideologies, and in reality we're voting for a carefully crafted narrative that is crafted by people who want you to believe a particular way. And I know that feels kind of negative, and that makes me so sad to even voice that out loud and to vocalize that out loud. But I would say that I hope in some way that we experience real freedom and real understanding of what it means to be a global citizen and to be a citizen of this country, is that we understand that. And the complexity of who I am as a person and how I interact with other people and how they understand their own complexity and their own humanity means that I can believe a lot of things that belong in a lot of different camps.(01:07:19):And that's okay. That's what honestly, being intrinsically American means, but also just to understand our own humanity in the global context is there are things that I will feel one way about and they squarely belong in one camp, but there are other things I believe that belong in another camp. And both of those things can be true for me without somebody demanding that I carry some sort of alliance or allegiance to one person. I think that's so gross and so foul at the end of the day. I think what makes America so interesting and so fascinating, but I also think so beautiful and so compelling and so desiring for people who are coming into our borders, is that there is this understanding that I can stand squarely as an individual person and be able to express myself as who I am as an individual and also belong to a collective that makes space for that.(01:08:14):And that is intrinsically what it means to be America. I'm free to be us, but I'm also free to be me. And so I think politics pushes us into a narrative that is against intrinsically who we say we are, and that really is the basis of freedom. And so that's what I would feel about that. Now, this is an added bonus, and I know you didn't ask for this, Danielle, but I'm going to give it to you anyways because I firmly believe this. I think it is more dehumanizing, and I think it is so incredibly sad that we don't allow for people to be principled moderates. That we are sanctifying the ability to castrate people's ability to be able to stand in the middle. And we vilify them as being weak or vilify them as being cowards because their understanding of what is actually evil is.(01:09:09):It's a broad spectrum. And to say that there is good everywhere, it is true to say there is evil everywhere is true. And how people interface with both of those things is true. And so I hate that we have become okay at using our theology and using our social media platforms and using our politicking as throwing stones for people who say, I want to hold a faithful middle. And that faithful middle means that I can believe a multitude of things and that I stand in the own gray and the nuance of who I am and how I understand my neighbors and what that looks like. And we know that some of those people are standing with compassion and with courage. And to call those people cowards, I think is the most ignorant, I'm trying to find the kindest way to say this, right? So I think it is just absolutely ignorant.(01:10:00):And then we've used quotes out of context and scriptures out of context to tell those people that somehow they're bad and evil people. And it's just not true that they're honestly sometimes the bridge builders and the unifier in places where they are trying to be peacemakers and they're trying to be people of peace. They're trying to be people of belonging and welcome. And so they're holding a faithful middle to say, my heart is going to take enough of a beating where people may misunderstand me, but I'm going to make it big enough and available enough where everybody can come sit under my tent. And I think that's brave work. I think that is courageous work, and I think that is humbling work that we could learn more from instead of castigating really more than anything else. So those are my 2 cents, honestly, more than anything else.(01:10:51):The last 2 cents I could probably give you that I think is so shameful is I am tired of any political party that tells me that they are doing more for working class Americans or doing more for poor people, and yet they're spending 2 billion to fly somebody around and send me junk mail to my home. I would much rather you stop buying ad space and then you actually go and serve the poor and somebody takes a picture of you doing that on accident. And I actually get to see that and go, oh my gosh, they're actually serving the poor. Do not tell me you're serving the poor or serving working class Americans and you haven't talked to one or seen one in a very long time. And my God, you have not lived in our shoes. You have not lived on our pay scales. You have not come in and volunteered regularly, and you only show up when there's a camera crew doing that.(01:11:34):That is so gross to me, and I hate that you send me mail about it and spend 2 billion fundraising for things like that. And yet that money could go to the poor and that money could go to programs. If there's one thing that makes me want to soapbox so bad, it is that more than anything else, I don't want to hear what your fundraising dollars have done to actually help your campaign. And that thing becomes a total waste when you lose. And that money doesn't go into the pockets of people. That money goes into the pockets of advertisers and radio stations and TV stations and social media influencers and all sorts of nonsense and actually doesn't go into the pockets and the hands of people who are feeding the poor that is garbage. So I feel very strongly about that, but I dunno if this is what you need, but that's how I make space. I make space for people who live at Principled Middle because I think blessed are the peacemakers and I want them to feel safe with me.Speaker 13 (01:12:26):Good morning. My name is Luis Cast. How do I see my own humanity in this political context? Well, it's simple as that. I'm a human being. I'm not a pawn or a little peace on a game. I'm a human being born and raised in Mexico, but I live here in the United States over half of my life now, and I'm a human being. And no matter what the promises they give me or what they're going to do in government, I'm still just a human being that wants the best for me and my family. And that's what they need to address the human being in us regarding not regarding color or race or where they come from. Treat us a as human beings. And the other question, how do I make space for folks who do not share my political view?(01:13:46):Well, again, it's just simple. I was taught that love whoever disagree with you or even your enemy. But to be honest, that's the hardest thing to do. People that don't agree with you or you don't agree with them, and sometimes they even hurt you. But I try to do my best, honestly, just to listen and sometimes put myself in their shoes because everybody has been brought up differently in families, cultures, regions of the country from the south, from New England, they call in the west in California. So we all have different views. So I just don't have an ear and sometimes an opinion, but mostly an ear so they can really listen to what they, I believe, where they come from, where they come from. So that is what I try to do. No, perfect, but that's what I try to do.Speaker 14 (01:14:59):Hi, my name is Claire. I am a white, cisgender, heterosexual woman. I live in Paulsboro, Washington. So the first question is how do I see my humanity in the context of this current political moment? And I'd start off by saying I come from a pretty privileged place, like my own personal humanity isn't very threatened just because I'm white, I'm straight, and yeah, my own family background. I have a lot of support and I'm not ever threatened with becoming homeless or something if I can't pay my bills. But still things are really scary for so many people right now. So I definitely feel that all the time. And I would say that it's just a really disheartening time. A lot of the, I mean, pretty much all politicians, I'd say are very untrustworthy at a local and national level. And I think we're all seeing that, especially in the context of what's happening in Gaza.(01:16:26):For the last over a year now, all these politicians that felt like they were progressive and would speak out when heinous things happened, most of them have gone silent or completely denied what's happening in Gaza, or just said really brief empty words, always proceeded by talking about Israeli hostages. So yeah, it's been terrifying because we realize the extent of politicians care for the general public and for the global wellbeing of humanity. And it only stretches so far because first and foremost, they're concerned about their own and standing in the political world because we've seen a lot of people lose their reelections for standing up for Palestinians.(01:17:38):And I think what's really disheartening is seeing it at a local level. In some ways, we expect national politicians to be pretty sleazy and skirt around really big, terrible, important issues. But seeing it at a local level has been really terrifying because I mean, they said it was then a couple decades ago, like 30, 40 years ago, there's more crises going on. And that really, for me, I've always thought, well, this is how it's always been. There's just the media reports on more stuff. We have social media, we can't hide a lot of things. So I don't know if that's true or not, but I mean, it probably is. We're in a time of climate crisis too, so it makes sense that things are just, they're not slowing down.(01:18:49):I don't know where I was going with that, but yeah, I guess I would just say humanity. It feels threatened on so many levels for my queer friends, for my friends of color, for any women or female identifying people just on so many levels, it just feels like our rights are being threatened and everything feels tenuous. If Trump wins, what the hell is going to happen to this country? And if Kamala wins, what the hell is going to change? I don't believe in politicians. They're not going to save us. That's how it feels. We have to save each other that are diehard Trumpers or something. I'd say all those people are my relatives that live in Wisconsin or a couple of coworkers, and we don't talk about politics, but on a deeper level, I try to remember that it's hard, right? Because hard, it's hard not to hate people for what they believe. I guess that's a horrible thing to say, isn't it? But I see the consequences of people who vote for Trump and put him in office the first time, their direct consequences because they voted for Trump and because of their beliefs and because of what they repost online. That just has bred so much hatred, and it's led to people being terrified for their lives and people losing their lives. There's so much propaganda being shoved down people's throats, the people that have Fox News plane 24 7.(01:21:06):I don't know the last time I watched Fox News, but I've overheard it. That stuff is crazy. They're being fed lie after lie after lie. So yeah, it's like people are also a product of their culture and it's hard to fight against your culture. So I try to give people some grace with that, but I also don't know how they can't see their own beliefs as harmful and full of hatred. I really don't understand. So yeah, it's hard. It's hard to remember people's humanity, but I have obviously my own blind spots and my own ways that I'm super ignorant and willfully ignorant in the things I look away from and the things like I'm resistant to learning because it's inconvenient or uncomfortable for me. So I try to hold that space for people too, because we're all learning. Yeah, it's a process of trying to remember people's humanity. And I think, yeah, but it just feels like when people support someone that spews so much hatred, it's really hard not to pin that blame on them as well, because they're also at fault for putting people like that in power. So I don't know. Yeah, it's a tough one.Speaker 15 (01:22:55):I feel like as somebody with various subordinated identities, whether that's being queer, being Latina, having a disability, being a woman, all of those things are increasingly politicized. And so for me, I find that political discourse specifically is often really dehumanizing and even performative on the other end of the spectrum. So our two major parties, Republican and Democrat with Republican, it's we well known that those political parties as they exist currently are working to strip away rights from people in all of those identity and affinity groups. While the Democrats, which I won't even say left, because current Democrats are right of center, when you look at a global pe

 Link to Solutions article: HEREhttps://www.kitsapsun.com/story/opinion/columnists/2023/03/10/parent-group-offers-steps-toward-safety-inclusion-in-schools/69987422007/ Latino parent group presents steps toward safety, inclusion in schoolsDanielle S. CastillejoGuest columnOn February 7 community members gathered at a town hall meeting in Poulsbo to support the Latino Parent Group's request to the North Kitsap School District (NKSD) to investigate ongoing allegations of discrimination against students. At least 125 people attended, including Kitsap ERACE Coalition, the NAACP, Suquamish Tribal Elder Barbara Lawrence, Kitsap SURJ, local business owners, teachers, Poulsbo City Council, Kitsap Public Health, Kitsap Black Student Union, Kitsap Strong, Living Life Leadership, Poulsbo for All, Kitsap Mental Health Services representatives, Central Kitsap school administrators, Bainbridge Island school administrators, Bainbridge Island's mayor and Cultural Council, and many Latino families.We are grateful we are not alone. And we express our gratitude to the North Kitsap School District for processing some 85 emailed complaints and hiring an investigator to explore and resolve these concerns.In Kitsap County, we must urgently consider practical solutions for addressing racism in education, its effects on our youth's learning and mental health. Unaddressed racial trauma in our schools creates barriers to education, work, and mental and physical health. Our youth — all youth — are searching for ways to cope with the effects of racism, the pandemic and violence.Therefore, we must also urgently pursue healing. The North Kitsap Latino community offers the school district community-based practical solutions for forming partnerships with immigrants of other national origins, African Americans, Asian American/Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous students. Working together, we give all of our children a more inclusive society.In the words of Cesar Chavez: “We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community. Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.”The problems the Latino community face are deeply rooted in Kitsap County's historical racism, discrimination, and resulting harm to others who are perceived as “different.” Latino families share an important indigeneity connection with the Suquamish and Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribes, on whose ancestral lands we are guests. We are deeply grateful for these Tribes' work and advocacy to achieve justice and healing on behalf of, not only themselves, but also many other Kitsap County communities, including ours.As committed investors in our county economically and socially, we are also deeply committed stakeholders in the education of our children. Empowering our Latino community and other communities of Color, which bear the impact of racism and discrimination, builds bridges and creates movement toward truth, healing, and reconciliation.In a story published by the Kitsap Sun last November on this issue, NKSD stated, "Students and families should feel welcome and have a sense of belonging in our schools. When there are barriers to this, it is on us to have the courageous conversations to make meaningful changes."To advance these aspirational goals, we have asked the NK School District for two things: Equal access to education for English language learners and a culture of belonging that includes educating and providing learning on nondiscrimination.We have also provided specific practical solutions:1.  An equity concern form to be provided in both English and Spanish. It may be completed by students, staff, parents or community members to report district or school equity concerns, as well as give positive feedback to the district.2. Critical communication such as student updates, school announcements, emergency messages, and counseling services will be made available in the top three languages other than English. Additionally, qualified interpreters will be made available for parents to communicate with administrators and educators at all school events.3. English-language acquisition and student supports:- English language learners will receive language support regularly, for a minimum 4 days a week, at 20 minutes a day. These students will be placed in classrooms with teachers trained in evidence-based teaching strategies while supported by administrators in their classroom needs.- The district ensures all students have access to understanding their class content and materials, in classes, such as English, math, science, music, and all electives. - English language learning will include support for speaking, listening, reading and writing skills.4. Professional development will be provided for administrators, teachers, para-professionals and any staff working with children and youth, covering these specific topics: the impact of racial trauma, understanding student needs, how to support students, mental health resources, equality, and equity.5. Paid community liaisons to provide direct support to families through advocacy, creating safety and belonging, and addressing mental health needs. Each of the following will have a liaison: African American, Asian American Pacific Islander, Latino and Indigenous communities.6. The Latino community will collaborate with the district and other community liaisons to gather and elevate the voice of their community needs to explore partnership opportunities. Then, within this partnership, they will form 2-, 3- and 5-year plans to ensure students of color and their parents are supported in their educational needs.7. An education equity council will review the equity concern forms, discuss solutions to equity concerns, implement solutions, advise the school administration and school board, and develop pathways to understanding on behalf of students and the district. These practical solutions undergird our children's education. Along with creating a sense of belonging, the solutions build important frameworks for trust among the district, the Latino community and other communities of color. When the Kitsap County Health Department declared racism a public health crisis in 2021, the county recognized our situation. Loneliness and a lack of belonging are common threads for children of all national origins and races in this post pandemic world. Our urgent desire for unity, coupled with practical solutions, supports this community in a world that is increasingly fragmented. Kitsap County students are asking our generation to provide safety, learning opportunities, and model inclusion, not racism. Let us follow their lead and work together. Danielle S. Castillejo writes on behalf of the North Kitsap School District Latino Parent Group and Kitsap Advocating for Immigrant Rights and Equality.

STOP the HARM NOWBackground informa/on, context and chronology of events: For those fighting racism in the North Kitsap School District In November you, NK families, were asked to come up with solutions to the problems your students and you are experiencing. As a member of the Poulsbo Latino community I was invited to support my community in coming up with viable solutions. A good place to start is by understanding the laws, policies and your rights.  My role here today is to share these guiding policies and laws with you so that you can come up with viable solutions.  I am also here to support your linguistic needs as an interpreter.  I am not here representing North Kitsap or my current district, again, I am here as a community member.  As I am not a representative of any district, I cannot answer questions regarding district work.  En noviembre se les pidió a ustedes, las familias de NK, que propongan soluciones a los problemas, y experiencias de sus estudiantes y ustedes. Como miembro de la comunidad latina de Poulsbo, fui invitada a apoyar a mi comunidad para encontrar soluciones. Un buen lugar para comenzar es comprender las leyes, las pólizas y sus derechos civiles. Estoy aquí hoy para compartir estas pólizas y leyes con ustedes para que guíen las soluciones. También estoy aquí para apoyar sus necesidades lingüísticas como intérprete. No estoy aquí representando a North Kitsap o mi distrito actual, nuevamente, estoy aquí como miembro de la comunidad. Como no soy representante de ningún distrito, no puedo responder preguntas sobre el trabajo del distrito.Guía de pólizas para estudiantes multilingües del estado de WA (página 36):Guía de derechos civiles del personal: los distritos escolares tienen la obligación de proporcionar el personal y los recursos necesarios para implementar de manera efectiva los modelos de Programa de Educación Transicional Bilingüe (TBIP). Esta obligación incluye tener maestros altamente calificados para brindar servicios de desarrollo del idioma inglés, maestros de contenido básico (por ejemplo, maestros de matemáticas, ciencias, ciencias sociales, etc), maestros capacitados y apoyados que brinden acceso significativo a contenido riguroso a nivel de grado, administradores capacitados en la adquisición de un segundo idioma que puedan evaluar a estos maestros y materiales adecuados y apropiados para el Programa de Educación Transicional Bilingüe.WA State Multilingual Learner Policies and Practices Guide (page 36): "Civil Rights Staffing Guidance—School districts have an obligation to provide the personnel and resources necessary to effectively implement their chosen Transitional Bilingual Instructional Program (TBIP) models. This obligation includes having highly qualified teachers to provide English language development services, trained and supported core content teachers who provide meaningful access to rigorous, grade-level content, administrators trained in second language acquisition who can evaluate these teachers, and adequate and appropriate materials for the TBIP program."Definiciones de Leyes:Castañeda Para Pickard la enseñanza del desarrollo del idioma inglés debe estar diseñada para satisfacer las necesidades individuales de progreso sostenido hacia el logro del dominio del inglés en la menor cantidad de tiempo (Castañeda v. Pickard, 1981, Tribunal de Apelaciones de EE. UU.).Castañeda Para Pickard proporciona una prueba de tres frentes para guiar a los distritos en el diseño, evaluación y mejora de su programa de desarrollo del idioma inglés para estudiantes de inglés/multilingües:El programa diseñado debe basarse en una teoría educativa sólida y/o resultados de investigación científica de alta calidad.El programa debe contar con el personal y los fondos suficientes.El distrito está obligado a evaluar la eficacia de los servicios proporcionados y hacer ajustes para garantizar que los estudiantes alcancen el dominio del idioma y el éxito académico.Definitions of Laws:Castañeda v. Pickard English language development instruction must be designed to meet individual needs for sustained progress toward reaching English proficiency in the least amount of time (Castañeda v. Pickard, 1981, U.S. Court of Appeals).Castañeda v. Pickard provides a three-pronged test to guide districts in designing, evaluating, and improving their English language development program for multilingual/English learners:Program designed must be based on sound educational theory and/or high-quality research findings.Program must be sufficiently staffed and funded.District is obligated to evaluate the effectiveness of the services provided and make adjustments to ensure students are achieving language proficiency and academic success.Lau Para Nichols:  Los estudiantes multilingües/de inglés elegibles deben recibir apoyos adecuados para un acceso significativo a contenido riguroso (Lau para. Nichols, 1974, Tribunal Supremo de EE. UU.). Actualizado en julio de 2022 3 Plyler v. Doe La Corte Suprema de EE. UU.Lau v. Nichols Eligible multilingual/English learners must be provided appropriate supports for meaningful access to rigorous content (Lau v. Nichols, 1974, U.S. Supreme Court). Updated July 2022 3 Plyler v. Doe The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in"Email #**:  English Language Learners/Access, Follow up on Town Hall, February 7, 2023(See youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/live/PrQ1voPeb8o?feature=share) & StatementParent - Volunteer (#4) Statement on English Language Learner Access for child:Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964(link is external) (34 C.F.R. Part 100)Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964(link is external) (42 U.S.C. §2000c, et seq.)Executive Order 13166Email #** to be filed under NonDiscrimination and Civil Rights  (Discrimination can also occur when a school's policy is neutral on its face and is administered in an even handed manner but has a disparate impact—i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect—on students of a particular protected class.) Please follow 3210/3210P for investigation procedures, and investigate the English Language program, understand how it is currently operating, and make adjustments to comply with the law/s.STATEMENT: Parent - Volunteer -  Some of the things I believe could improve.Having better communication with families in their native language.Having an EL para at every school to provide services to students on a regular basis as part of their day. The district took that away a couple years ago and the services have not been consistent or successful.Students would also benefit from a curriculum like the one that was being used when every school had an EL para. The curriculum worked well, and kids were exiting the program due to the increase in vocabulary and understanding of the English language.A designated classroom would be ideal. Many EL kids use resources around them and for that reason they are always aware of what is going on around them. Working in the hall creates lots of distractions and is not a very healthy learning environment.You are seen as being "different" or being left out because communication is a problem. I understand the frustration of the families not speaking the language and not receiving support in their native language.I hope for the best outcome for these kids and families.It's time they receive what they are entitled, deserve and need.It's time for Equity.I ask the district to immediately address the English Language program in North Kitsap Schools, and utilize the EL resources we currently have, communicate with parents on how they can support their children and the district, and engage the solutions presented." To Whom It May Concern,  I am writing in response to the lack of action taken by the North Kitsap School District after repeated and clear reports of racist incidents amongst the Latino students, a lack of equal and just access to Education for English Language Learners, and refusal to act to create a culture of acceptance, belonging that includes educating staff on nondiscrimination.  As a mental health therapist in the state of Illinois, our school districts would never ignore the complaints and concerns this community have brought to your board and would have already made swift and significant change and have educators in place to teach teachers, staff and administration ways they can create a safe learning environment and easy access to learning for all students.    It is well researched and documented that student who attend schools where they do not feel safe from bullying and harassment and have no source of protection or support simply do not learn in these environments. They will often remain in a dysregulated state emotionally and their bodies will remain on high alert to protect themselves from possible attacks and harm.   A safe environment is a prerequisite for productive learning (Maslow, 1970; Piaget, 1936). If students feel unsafe at school, they may be less likely to go to school at all, or less able to focus on learning while at school. Your job as an administration is to create the kind of environment that is conducive to learning.  I am sad and angry that this has been an ongoing issue and that there is such a lack of movement to make corrections, come alongside the parents and students and to start a coordinated plan of action help create significant change.  I am asking that you listen to those who have concerns and the ideas they are presenting to help their kids be safe and the parents have appropriate was to communicate concerns with quick responses.  Cyndi Mesmer, LCPCOwner & Clinical DirectorThe Art of Living Counseling Center900 Pyott Road, Suite 102Crystal Lake, IL 60014Yourstorygroup.com

Hey y'all, some reason I have to think that all of us got into this work is because there's something about telling our story or being on the other side of listening to someone else's story that connects us. And it's not just the pain that connects us, it's the goodness that brings us together when we can be with another person in their pain and the story of their people and the pain of their people. And when we joined them in that, when we witnessed them in that story, there's a sense of love, a sense of healing, a sense of like, you're not alone anymore. A sense of we can be together on this and move forward. And so the past weekend, we weren't together. I felt that rupture. So what does it mean to tell a truer story? What does it mean to engage collective trauma, but also collective healing?I mean, when we think about collective trauma, it's a traumatic experience. Like here's the, like by the book Play of Collective Trauma, it's a traumatic experience that affects entire people, groups, communities, or societies. The size and scope of which shatter the very fabric of the communities impacted. I think about Uvalde, I think about Buffalo. I think about the Atlanta massacre. There's a number of examples we have in our communities of collective trauma. It not only brings distress and negative feelings and consequences to individuals, but it also changes the very fabric of our communities. A sense of life, like before the event, and a sense of life after the cataclysmic event. When I think about collective trauma and the Latinx story, it's like, how do we even define Latinx, right? Like, I'm Mexican. My mom's mostly indigenous, and her family came over from Mexico. Then I know there's those of us that come from other countries in Latin America that are often forgotten.There's Puerto Rico, there's Afro-Latinos, there's the indigenous Latinos, there's fair-skinned Latinos. There's really dark-skinned Latinos that aren't black. So we have this wide variety of what it is that's come to be called commonly as Latinx. So when we talk about telling, uh, a truer story, we're engaging all of these ethnicities at once under the Latinx umbrella, which actually isn't very fair. We're talking about memories. We have these collective traumas. We didn't really talk about collective resilience, but let's be real. We have collective ways of being resilient and surviving and thriving. We're not just surviving. Many of our communities are thriving in our own ways. But let's go back to collective memory. So we remember these historical accounts, and there's facts and events, but how do we make meaning of those facts? Or the memory is how we make meaning. What are the stories we tell about the events?It lives beyond the lives that are directly impacted. So there will be stories told about Uvalde, the stories told about the teachers, the stories told about the students, the parents who were waiting and fighting to get into the school. They will tell their own stories now. And in a generation, people will be telling stories about what they remember from the stories they were told. Collective memory is remembered by a group members that may be far removed from the original traumatic events in time and space. There's three things I want us to think about from a Latinx, and I'm, I know it's very general. I want us to think about [inaudible] heart to heart listening. I want us to think about testimonial like a testimony technically in English, but it's a sharing, telling or expressing these events in the presence of a collective community. It's a strategy for survival resistance, and it's a refusal rooted in indigenous traditions and the Latin American social movements.Speaker 2 (05:06):So I think that, that, that might be the sense of heart to heart listening, right? Like there's something that happens where, right, that, that's a part of the alignment is I can read with my eyes the, the space, right? And then this thing about testimonial, what comes to my mind is that the phraseology keeping it real, right? This idea that with there, like the story that is being told needs to be a true story. Mm-hmm. , we have lots of, you know, when you hear the snaps and all this, but the sense that something has resonated in my body, w with the sense of like, now what you just said is that that's the truth, right? Mm-hmm. and, and, and a problem. If that, if that's not what happens, right? To the point, that is a compliment. Oh, he keeps it real. She keeps it real. He keeps it 100, right? It's the basic sense. You're, you are telling, you're, you're saying the story that you're giving is the truer or truest version of what happened. Um, and probably for the last one, in terms of trust or confidence or inclusion, My, I I will probably say, um, the, the sense when I be like, oh, that's my girl and we're here, right? Mm-hmm. , that's, and again, with the eyes, it's something like these two things. If the first two things happen that leaves the door open for a sense of, there, there is a trust and a confidence in the sense that we are in alignment together, right? Right. And, um, if one of those three things is not legit, then you are out. We are like, we not here. Mm-hmm. , do you know what I'm saying? I mean, that's very, uh, colloquial in the language, but I think the, the, the dynamic is true nonetheless. Right? What's the version? And so there is a sense even that my whole body has to be engaged in the process for me to feel this kind of alignment. I need to see it, touch it, taste it, hear it. Like all of my senses need to be engaged before I feel like I could say, right? And if I, if I don't have that, I don't know. I don't know. You , right? Like, I don't know. You like that?Speaker 1 (07:32):Mm-hmm. ? Mm, mm-hmm. . Tj, any thoughts or anything to add or comments? Not yet that I'm enjoying this conversation. I think one thing I wanted to add, Brooklyn is like, trust is something that happened at my daughter's quinceanera. Now my fam, no, they're not my family, but I'm calling them my family. They all came and chow and Corte, it's their, um, their daughter and their, and their son-in-law came, the son-in-law's white. He's, and he's, he's joined the family. And, uh, they're always telling me like, Hey, he didn't say hi to so-and-so, can you help him out? You know? So he didn't speak.Speaker 2 (08:14):Yeah.Speaker 1 (08:15):Didn't speak. So, uh, that's a big thing, right? To say hi to everybody. I'm all say, Hey, did you say hi to them? He is like, I think I did. I'm like, brother, like, you better go do it again. They don't feel like you really said hi. He's like, I waved. I'm like, no. They wanna like, no, thatSpeaker 2 (08:29):Ain't no,Speaker 1 (08:30):No. They, you gotta like shake your hand. And so they're giving him, they're giving him hands, right? But they, they're keeping him. They're not, they're not, they're not pushing him out. And so at, at the point where the dancing was on and the dj, they requested a song and they're like, Sam, Sam, get out there and dance. And Sam was like, okay. And it's this, it's this, basically it's this Mexican line dance. And he was right on it. He had the whole dance down and everybody cheered for him. They were like, you're in, you're in. And they were going nuts. And afterwards he was glowing. He was so happy. And it, it wasn't a sense of like, if he didn't do it right, he was gonna be ridiculed. It was just like, you're part of us, you know? Mm-hmm. . And so that's kind of what I think too about trust and inclusion, like the trust to share moments like that with someone mm-hmm. even in fun times, you know? Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Does that make sense? ItSpeaker 2 (09:33):Makes perfect sense.Speaker 1 (09:35):I wish you could see this guideline dance. ItSpeaker 2 (09:38):Makes perfect sense.Speaker 1 (09:40):. And by the way, Mexicans do a lot of line dancing. And that's,Speaker 2 (09:44):I mean, you know, black people know a little bit, just a little bit, just a little bit about mine.Speaker 1 (09:50):So we have [inaudible] testimonial and za, these are the three elements that I believe are essential when bringing our voices, when bringing our stories, when living inside of the collective story of Latinx peoples. What happens when that story is fragmented or edited? When we just take out a little piece of history when we say, oh yeah, there were three cops at Uvalde. What happens to the story? What happens to the memory of that story? And how is that passed on from generation to degeneration?Speaker 2 (10:29):And by the time they get off the ship, it is, it is the creation of a new people group,(10:36):Which is, it's, it's mildly controversial, but not really. Cuz nobody, even though, even though there's a whole sort of back to Africa and I wanna do the 23 and me thing and find out like what tribe from Ghana I came from, it, it isn't really about that kind of fracturing, right? Mm-hmm. and I and so there wasn't people, there's something about what she said that resonates with people enough that you didn't hear any real pushback on, on that ideology. So I'm wondering Right, if I'm wondering about that, I'm wondering about that felt experience and lived reality and if the invitation, even in the Latinx experience, is to not, not, not fracture it that much, right? Is there some invitation in the text and in the lived experience that is about, we we're not going back to EdenSpeaker 1 (11:26):Mm-hmm.Speaker 2 (11:27):We're we like, we are pressing forward to, to the city of God and when we get there, your, you are, you will be able to hold and there's absolute invitation from Jesus to hold Mexican AmericanSpeaker 1 (11:44):Mm-hmm. mm-hmm. ,Speaker 2 (11:49):Right? In a way that would allow you to note the Asian ancestry and the African ancestry, whatever else in the indigenous ancestry with all the honor and celebration it deserves, and not have that be a fracture. But African American, it is, is a term of respect. And it, and it's also a notation that you are an outsider cuz we don't call each other that mm-hmm. , you know what I mean? So, and, and to me, whenever I say like Asian American, I feel stupid. Like I be, I feel like I'm un I'm entering into the conversation in a way that is unintelligent because I, I, I think it's a dishonor to, to slap that name when what I really wanna know is what country are you from? And is it better for me to identify you as Japanese-American or Chinese-American or Taiwanese than it is for me to say Asian American. You know what I mean? Like, I, I just feel the awkwardness of how's this gonna read a a again, I think because I'm aware none of these are self named monikers. Mm-hmm. , they're all imposed, but, um, by whiteness. And so it always feels awkward.Speaker 1 (13:09):And I mean, the additional con conversation for Latinx, even Latinx, I hate that word, but even the additional conversation is how have people of all these various backgrounds had to rally together to fight western intervention in their cities, in their countries, you know? Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So they have to rally around that. But even that gets confusing because with the infusion of like money and power from the United States or other outside interests, it even splits. It splits people even more. But I think when people get to the United States, they say stuff like, I'm Cuban. Mm-hmm. , you know, or I'm Mexican. There's not, there's a way of surviving in that. Right?Speaker 2 (13:56):Right. Plus what do you do with the, because like where I grew up, if you were Puerto Rican on the west coast, that made you Mexican, but if you're Puerto Rican on the east coast, you are black like end of story, end of conversation. And so even, even that is like mm-hmm. . Yeah. Like all, yeah, all those, all those lines, it is different.Speaker 1 (14:25):So trauma decontextualized over time in a family can look like family trait and trauma decontextualized in a people can look like culture. Yeah. SMA MEK had a lot of good points there. As I say that, what do you notice in your body? Are you numb? Are you angry? Are you frustrated? Why is intergenerational story important to you? Why do you think it's important to La Latinx peoples, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans folks from El Salvador, Argentina? Why does collective story matter? And what happens when that story is fragmented or edited? If we just take out a piece of the story like in Alde, what was going on for you when you believed that there were only three police officers there when there were 10, when there was a possibility that the police didn't arrive until after the shooting started, that the door was locked to the school? What happens when we edit the story of a people group, or the traumas that a people group's experienced, or what happens when we edit the healing power that a culture has within itself? When we forget about Tika, when we forget about testimonial, when we forget about the idea of za, and that at the root of our culture perhaps was inclusion and trust,Speaker 2 (15:59):I think in some ways we've been asserting that the, the whole, this whole time, right? This idea that like, if you're black, you need to lean fully in into that and fully into the ways in which your culture, that culture has made you, made, made pathways towards healing for you mm-hmm. , right? And the way that your culture has understood and made meaning out of your story, um, and, and, and therefore created avenues of, of, of, of, of healing for you, right? In, in a sense, you're asking what archetypes right? Ha has, has your culture created for you? Um, and, and, and, and that the more that we do that, the less dissonance we have, right? Mm-hmm. mm-hmm. . Um, and in some ways the very creation of sort of the identity of the oppressed, right? Is the, the, the, the very identity that gets created under the force and weight of oppression is that is what healing looks like, right?(17:04):I mean the, like, the meaning that gets made out of the identity of the hyphenated existence is to define the harm and then define what it looks like could be healed from it mm-hmm. in a way that is unique to the story that you have, right? And then the truth is the same is true for the majority culture, right? I mean, and the, and the work that will have to be done on behalf of our white brothers and sisters is what does it look like to tell a true story? And what does healing look like? Mm-hmm. , right? And, and I think the, the pitfall is if the invitation at a majority culture is to not tell the true story, if the invitation out of the perpetrator culture is to be dismissive and to live in a level of denial for what the true story is, you never get to those pathways or architects of healing because you, you can't admit that harm has actually been done.Speaker 1 (17:57):I actually have a frame in my body that's working towards healing. I have been created that way. And that is good.Speaker 2 (18:06):And that is resiliency, right? It is the God given capacity to navigate the harm that is embedded in your story, right? And, and it is this sense that Jesus knew in this world you will have trouble. Like, like it's, it's, it, trauma is going to hit you, right? But, but I have embedded in, in, in, in your collective story, a a sense of what healing looks like and redemption looks like for you, right? And, and, and resiliency is your, is really in some ways the capacity to tap into that mm-hmm. and to leverage it.Speaker 1 (18:47):I'm gonna jump into something a little more heady, even though it's about the body. So this chart's gonna pop up and you're gonna look at it and you're gonna be like, what the heck? Well, the chart is made by my friend Jenny McGrath, and she has, uh, worked it from Ruby j Walker, and so it's been adapted. So we have a number of citations here, and I want you to notice that's very important, and this is my take on this chart. Our different cultures allow us to be in these different states and, and kind of like what we've talked about before. And that's not wrong. And, and I think, I think what's hard about this is that some of our resiliency has been pathologized.Speaker 2 (19:32):Yes. Mm-hmm. , very much so, right? And the, the simple argument that, uh, uh, because our, our whatever reaction we took in the moment was in fact a reaction to something traumatic is the thing that pathologizes it, right? And, and I, I think that's a mistake. It's like to say that we were kicked out of the garden, and because of that, we built, we built a response to that severing that the response itself is pathological. Because our goal is to be back where we were in the garden before sin entered it. That that's not how the story go. That's not how it works. Mm-hmm. , right? I mean, yes, we were excised from the garden, right? And what's pathological is that she ate the damn apple when you kind said don't do it, that that part is a problem. But, but, but, but the capacity that we developed to live life outside of the garden is not itself pathological simply because it is in reaction to the fact that we no longer live in the garden, right?(20:37):That the, like, there will be a reaction and there's good reaction and healthy reaction that is, that is in fact resiliency. Mm-hmm. . And then there are other reactions that are pathological that are problematic and that we do need to address, right? Mm-hmm. . But the simple factor that something is a reaction to a traumatic event does not itself pathologize it. Mm-hmm. , right? And this is the part where I, I, I, tide Trit has a song, um, and there's a line in the song where he says, um, something of like, the devil's gonna wish he never messed with me because I, like, I came back stronger and better than I would if, if he would've left me alone in the first place. Right? And so there, there's, there's something I think we're missing in the theological frame that that is like, um, the, there's something that happens in the WestEd and for evil, God moves for good. There's something in whatever that switch is that rotation, that flip that is of significant valueSpeaker 1 (21:46):Mm-hmm.Speaker 2 (21:47):, right? And if we simply pathologize it, because it is a reaction to a move of evil, we have missed the, like, the mystery of God in that moment to take a thing that was meant to be our downfall, and not only caused us to survive it, but to, but it is that thing that actually makes us better, stronger, more like him, right? And so, so that in and of itself is good. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. , I, and so there's something of the ability to move up and down this chart that is, that is freaking brilliantSpeaker 1 (22:23):Mm-hmm. . So, so I think I wanna go back to that story in Genesis. And when, you know, they ate the apple and then God came walking through, he, he asked them where they were, and, and through the conversation he says to them, you know, he finds out that they ate this apple and that that's why they were, you know, wearing, had sewed these fig leaves and made this, this, um, made these like coverings, right? I'm assuming for their body. But that's not, they weren't in trouble for their shame about their body. Mm-hmm. , you know, that's not why he, he kicked them out of Eden. It was for what they did, right? And then actually when they were out of Eden, he honored that shame. He made them close out of animals. So God actually didn't take them, didn't take their shame and move them through this polyvagal chart and force them to be calm in their body in a certain way.Speaker 3 (23:24):I think that's a really important thing to say. Mm-hmm. ,Speaker 2 (23:30):Right? And, and I think there's also a sense in which(23:36):That what, what you're, what that means then is that something was fundamentally altered in Adam and Eve, and they never got to go back to the state in which they were in Eden as if it had never happened. Right? And, and, and I think there's something about the gospel that is, um, that that isn't what, that's not what you're meant for, right? There's a kind of naivete before she eats the apple mm-hmm. , right? That we, we don't get to go back to mm-hmm. . And, and there might be some loss there, right. Of, of, of innocence, right? But there's also something to be gained in the process of having God honor the shame and re reshape it and reimagine it for us, right? Mm-hmm. . And, and it, um, there's a quote on my Facebook page, something of like, uh, um, a gratitude that I have for my struggle because in it, I stumbled across my own strength mm-hmm.(24:42):. And, and so there's something, I think, uh, there's something that we gain in the wrestling and the struggling and the coming out in a place of God honoring where we've been, including the shame that we have felt that that, so you don't ever really get to go back home again, right? Like, you never get to go back to life before the apple, but you do know the grief of having ate the apple, the agony of having eaten the apple and the sweetness of God having restored your relationship to him even after you ate the apple, right? That, and so there's a different depth to your relationship with Jesus.Speaker 1 (25:25):So the polyvagal chart, I think some people are like, what the heck is a polyvagal? And it, it's this nerve and it's got like this bowl of like nerve endings in your gut, and you have all of these neurons around there. So when people think they say, well, I'm thinking with my gut. Yeah, you are. You literally are. And when you feel, feel like I have a gut feeling or my stomach's upset, or I can't breathe, what's going on for your body, you're likely somewhere on this chart, or the way perhaps our cultures have been pathologized for staying in different places in this right cycle. And therefore, as a practitioner working in a cross-cultural environment, we have to come in with an attitude of first alignment and then willingness. Yes. To be curious and receive, you know what Ernest said, that criticiz ability,Speaker 2 (26:23):Right? Right. That plus I think, like I said, I think there's a time and a place for every single thing on here. So some of the pathologizing of communities of color is like, sometimes vigilance is not hypervigilance, sometimes it's just situationally appropriate vigilance, right? . And, and the problem is that the majority culture is isn't isn't paying attention to the power dynamics in the room. So they are misreading the need for vigilance in the room, right? And so and so then I'm not actually in this pathological space of hypervigilance, right? I'm not in this space of PTSDs where I'm actually not on the battlefield. And so my vigilance doesn't make any sense. I actually am, and my body is rightfully reading some sense of threat in the room. The problem is that in your not reading the room, well, as you know, as a, as a member of the culture that happens to be in power in that moment, you, you're, you're, you're not, you're not being honest about what the dynamics in the room really are.Speaker 1 (27:32):So thinking about the dorsal vagal system, dorsal vagal, sorry, it's freeze and appease. So in freeze we have some categories. Now these are categories that can be defined within each culture. They're not gonna look the same for me as they look for you. And this is something that we have to engage one another in curiosity and kindness. And as a therapist, I don't make assumptions about you, um, where you might be on this polyvagal chart, I chart, I can notice with you where you might be or what I'm experiencing. And then it's a collaborative effort for us to kind of decode what language comes between us. So I'm saying those, these words with that caveat in mind. So we have freeze, which is dissociation, depression, um, raised pain threshold, um, helplessness, shame. We have appease lack of boundaries, overcompensating, victimization, acquiescing. When you are in freeze and appease, that's gonna look different based on your individual story and your collective story.(28:38):And boundaries are defined differently. Overcompensating is defined different differently, victimization, acquiescing, all these things. So that's why it's important that you're in community when you're experiencing. You may feel like, Hey, I, I'm in this trauma state and, and I can tell you honestly, I was a little bit depressed this weekend and dissociated, uh, and what I experienced, just kind of being zoned out around my family, not able to focus after not being able to be together this weekend. We also have the sympathetic activation, which is fight flight. So fight again. Now, uh, western psychology has pathologized many of these words. So I want you to take these words with the caveat that I'm speaking from a particular location, from a particular education, which is largely a European white lens. And I am additionally adding on this lens of my Latinx culture and history and how I'm raising my kids.(29:33):So you're gonna hear all of that mixed together. So fight is rage, anger, irritation, and honestly, a lot of those I've needed to make change. Um, I'm gonna think about flight, panic, fear, anxiety, worry, concern. And again, have you been in those states? Cuz I have been, I've been worried, like, how's the group gonna be? How am I gonna be? Um, are we gonna be able to hang together? What's this gonna cost one another? Um, then I wanna think about ventral vagal, and that's called rest and digest. So you have words like centered, grounded, settled, curiosity and openness, compassionate and mindful of the present moment. It's possible you may be going up and down this chart, like what is Danielle gonna say? Mm-hmm. , what is Rebecca gonna say? What will happen in this moment mm-hmm. and, and to, for us to honor those bodily experiences. And maybe, you know, how we did with Jenny, just slow down and ask mm-hmm. , because I will be going up and down this chart during the talk because, you know, there's performance pressure. There's the idea of I wanna honor my culture. There's the idea of how do I interpret myself mm-hmm. . So I think it's fair to name that.Speaker 2 (30:59):Yeah. And that there are really good reasons why Right. That that, you know, and, and how do you step into a sense of self-evaluation about how much,(31:14):What, where's the line for me between like, this is a, a, a resilient response that I need to honor. And where there are places where there's some hyper vigilance, right? I mean, not that you wouldn't honor all of it, but to help them start to understand like there, there are resilient reactions and then there are reactions that are more about like being resigned to, to the weight o of our collective stories. Right? And the, the text doesn't ask us to be resigned. Right? Right. It it, it asks us, uh, to, to fight and to persevere, right? Um, and to press on towards the mark.Speaker 1 (31:51):And in in fact, that's what, you know, that's where we can come back to. Like, God didn't ask Adam to get on with it to like stay naked, right? And he didn't even call it out as a problem. He's just like, here man, here's some nicer clothes. Right?Speaker 2 (32:11):Right. And right. And, and, and you can almost hear in that a sense of like, like, Eden is where you started, but it isn't where you're gonna end up. And, and, and, and there is a journey that we will be on together, right? And so like, there's some things you're gonna need for the journey, including some clothes.Speaker 1 (32:33):And so you're gonna say, well, maybe I've been there this weekend too, but maybe you had trauma. So what is normal? It is normal to go through these different areas on the chart with some fluidity to move between them. And it's also normal for you to be a part of a collective that may be feeling a collective response to a trauma or to even a good moment. And for you also to have your own individual experience. So it's far more complex than either or. It's likely both. And.  

Latino parents, students say they face racism, discrimination at North Kitsap HighPeiyu LinKitsap SunNORTH KITSAP — More than 40 members of the Latino community gathered in the library of North Kitsap High School on Tuesday to tell high school administrators about instances of discrimination against Latino students.Participant after participant stood up and spoke, most in Spanish, offering testimonies that ranged from stories of racial bullying on school buses and on campus to not getting important school notices for parents printed in Spanish. One parent shared a story of her son being subjected to racial stereotypes, being told by a teacher he eats too many burritos.The meeting was organized by NK High Principal Megan Sawicki. Danielle Castillejo, a therapist, and her husband, Luis, parents of students at North Kitsap High School and Poulsbo Middle School, led most of the conversation and interpreted what Latino families shared from Spanish to English to the Sawicki. They also interpreted what Sawicki said from English to Spanish to the attendees. A Kitsap Public Health District community engagement specialist was at the meeting to help with the interpretation.Sawicki said she called the meeting after hearing from Castillejo and other Latino families that there was a need to better understand the experiences of Latino families and students in North Kitsap High School, and what the school can do to make them better."I may not have all the answers, but I'm hoping that we can — I can — start learning a little more from you about how things are going for you and for our kids," Sawicki told those at the meeting.Some parents said that some teachers do not respect Latino students and the Hispanic culture they belong to. Others said their students are being bullied on campus and on school buses, and when they reached out to the school to report it, their requests were ignored or not followed up on by school administrators. One parent said that a teacher told a student their performance was harmed because they had eaten too many burritos. One said students are not taught to be proud of their culture at school.Some said Latino students were not given assistance in applying for college or given information about scholarships. One shared that a student was discouraged to pursue his dream when the student told a teacher he wants to become an engineer. One claimed that Latino parents didn't get notices to attend school meetings and that none of the information provided by the school was in Spanish, creating a barrier for Latino parents who speak little English to understand what happens at school.The system needs to be changed, they said, and they urged the district to hold more meetings in the future.Melissa Ramirez, whose parents are immigrants, graduated from NKHS in June. She said she never saw any representation of her culture in her years growing up in North Kitsap and she felt she had to leave her culture to fit in at school."And the reason why I'm saying this in English is because the school system did rob me of a lot of my Spanish-speaking skills," Ramirez said at the meeting.Ramirez's parents are immigrants from Mexico and she was born and raised in Washington. Ramirez is now a freshman at Western Washington University studying business administration with a concentration in marketing, she said.Ramirez said her university has an ethnic student center that provides support for students of color, and she wishes she would have had that in North Kitsap.Julie Castillejo, Danielle Castillejo's daughter, an NK sophomore, said on Skyward, an online portal where North Kitsap High School communicates with students and parents, the system automatically put her race as "Chicano," which refers to Mexicans living in the U.S., and her main language as Spanish, instead of leaving the race and language parts blank for her to decide. Julie said she's three-quarters Mexican and one-quarter European."It was unfair for them to just assume my race and it wasn't the right thing to do," Julie Castillejo told Kitsap Sun.Charo De Sanchez, a Latino community leader and a parent who previously had a child in the district, told the Kitsap Sun she thinks teachers should be educated to respect the Latino Hispanic community, She said students learn from their behaviors.Danielle Castillejo said that more meetings are needed to discuss discrimination and racism against Latino students."Latino students are under-resourced, so we need to create more resources, more options," she told the Kitsap Sun. "The first thing we need to have is that the teachers are able to have some training on inclusivity."In a written statement sent to the Kitsap Sun following the meeting, the North Kitsap School District said that the district is "deeply saddened" by the examples shared and that it is committed to listening to students, parents and the community to address discrimination and racist behavior."While the stories we have heard in this meeting are hard to hear, we are grateful that our students and families feel safe in talking about these concerns with us; we realize that has not always been the case," the district said in the statement. "Students and families should feel welcome and have a sense of belonging in our schools. When there are barriers to this, it is on us to have the courageous conversations to make meaningful changes."The district said providing equitable access to educational opportunities for all students is in its strategic plan and that efforts to support staff development in diversity, inclusion and equity began in 2019 and continue."We have worked in partnership with many community members, our two sovereign nations, and families to improve how we serve all students. We have increased support resources at all schools in response to concerns and needs," the district said in the statement.The district said that all secondary schools have student voice groups with diverse representation that meet with the superintendent. Creating a safe, welcoming, inclusive school where all students and their families feel like they belong is the school district's top priority, it said. It encouraged students to report concerns immediately."As we are learning from our students we continue to work to improve systems, structures and their school experience," the statement said.Reach breaking news reporter Peiyu Lin at pei-yu.lin@kitsapsun.com or on Twitter @peiyulintw. Since late 2022, KAIRE has supported and come alongside the grassroots efforts of Latino/a/x students, families, and community of North Kitsap, amplifying their concerns and self-advocacy within North Kitsap School District (NKSD). These are broadly stated as equal access to education for English Language Learners and pursuit of a culture of belonging with teacher skills development in nondiscrimination. KAIRE and Latino/a/x community have articulated these issues and proposed specific solutions, directly communicated to NKSD in the FEB 22, 2023 "Seven Solutions" letter. For months, NKSD has failed to meaningfully engage with individual families or respond with a plan to implement the proposed solutions. KAIRE supports Latino/a/ students, families, and community in their demand that NKSD meet them on theirterms. The table must be set by community, not by the District. https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/news/2023/02/06/latino-parent-group-meeting-with-north-kitsap-schools-over-race-issues/69864128007/

LINKS to ARTICLEShttps://www.kitsapsun.com/story/news/2022/11/26/latino-parents-students-discrimination-racism-at-north-kitsap-high-school/69673972007/https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/news/2023/02/06/latino-parent-group-meeting-with-north-kitsap-schools-over-race-issues/69864128007/https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/opinion/columnists/2023/03/10/parent-group-offers-steps-toward-safety-inclusion-in-schools/69987422007/https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/news/2023/05/22/eliminate-racial-violencehundreds-protests-at-nksd-for-racial-discrimination-against-latino-students/70229951007/https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/opinion/readers/2023/05/20/we-have-no-confidence-in-nksd-leadership-to-handle-racism-bullying/70237118007/https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/news/2021/05/07/kitsap-public-health-district-declares-racism-public-health-crisis/4984962001/IN Partnership with KAIRE:Kitsap Advocating for Immigrant Rights & EqualitySince late 2022, KAIRE has supported and come alongside the grassroots efforts ofLatino/a/x students, families, and community of North Kitsap, amplifying their con-cerns and self-advocacy within North Kitsap School District (NKSD). These are broadlystated as equal access to education for English Language Learners and pursuit of aculture of belonging with teacher skills development in nondiscrimination. KAIRE andLatino/a/x community have articulated these issues and proposed specific solutions,directly communicated to NKSD in the FEB 22, 2023 "Seven Solutions" letter. Formonths, NKSD has failed to meaningfully engage with individual families or respondwith a plan to implement the proposed solutions. KAIRE supports Latino/a/xstudents, families, and community in their demand that NKSD meet themon theirterms. The table must be set by community, not by the District.Speaker 1 (00:25):Good morning. Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender healing. Um, sometimes we're talking a lot about the church, and you may have noticed a few months hiatus. Partly that is due to me, Danielle Rueb, Castillejo, doing this on my own, and also just in February, having a town hall and gathering the community together, which I want to talk more about and, and which this situation with the school board has not been resolved yet. So sadly, that has taken an, an honorable place of, of my time and I'm continuing to work towards that. But I thought it might be helpful to tell a little bit of the history of how that got started and, um, what happened for me and why the meeting happened in November of 2022. If you're following along, I'll put some links to the Kitsap Sun articles, uh, in the notes.  But if you're following along with the story, there was an original meeting in November 22nd, 2022 at North Kitsap High School in the library. It was me, my husband, uh, a couple of community members I didn't really know very well. And then we had like seven to 10 days, I can't remember exactly, I could look it up in my notes to invite, uh, community members, la Latino community members. But there was things and events that preceded, um, preceded that meeting time in November. And I think those, that's part of the history that's important to know over the last three years and actually since maybe even like 2015 and right leading up to Trump's election, there were so many things that happened in the school that Luis and I, my husband, my partner and I, we just really let them slide, uh, microaggressions with the kids, bullying comments at school.  And, you know, we semi address them, semi didn't address them, but just kind of trusted the school district to be following up on those issues. In 2016 when Trump was elected, I got a call from a friend and she said, Hey, we're not doing the celebration of Guadalupe. Everybody's afraid to meet, you know, Trump made president. This is a scary time. And if you're not familiar, what it is, uh, of, uh, December is the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the que that app appeared in Mexico and she's called the que de Guadalupe. And, and so I won't go into that history, but to celebrate that there's a mass, uh, there's singing, there's a process of communion, and then there's a celebration afterwards. So like the kids would dance, like sometimes there's mariachi, um, there's professional dancers that would come all, all the way to this little town here in Paul's bow.  And my kids, we got four little kids, they were always invited to participate by one of my dear friends. So I was assuming this event would happened. I got a call from my friend like, hey, it's not going to happen. And, and there's a lot of fear in the community, and we said, no, like, let's make it happen. Let's move in solidarity, let's do this thing. And I even had a little op-ed, uh, published in the Seattle Times about, uh, this event. So we had, we had the celebration of Guadalupe. It was amazing, amazing food. And Trump, uh, his presidency continued for the next four years, obviously, and 2020 hit and we were in election season and then suddenly it was also pandemic season. And so we were all at home. And it, it quickly became clear to me, um, just in my own personal family situation and with the other situations that I knew of in the community, that not everything was equal.  Not everything was going to be fair staying at home. When we first were at home, we had this, we didn't actually pay for internet at our house. I was in grad school at the time. I was trying to graduate 2020. I was going to graduate. We had this little hotspot we had bought on Verizon and we paid for a certain amount of like, gigs of internet per month. And we only turned it on when we really needed it. And we, we tried to limit our data too. So all of a sudden, imagine you got like four children at home, husband's unemployed, I need to do grad school. And we're all freaking sitting around our table cuz we live in a small house and, and we're trying to do schoolwork and we're, we got this hotspot running. Um, that's, that's an example of something that happened. And it, it took a few months, I think for us to get internet out to our house.  Speaker 1 (05:14):Um, just, they were backed up and whatnot. But I actually had a friend offer to pay for our internet. And that's what helped us get us through what was during this time that things became even more apparent in the school system. To me, various things happened to my kids, even being online. We struggled in a rural area to, um, my kids struggled to, when they would turn their homework in online, it would show that it was turned in on our side, but at the school side, it would look like they hadn't turned in any homework. And so, for instance, one of my children, it, it showed like complete zeros everywhere and being in grad school and all the stress we had, I I, I didn't pay attention till I got a letter and someone's like, like, yo, your kid's failing class, so that's not like my child. So we contacted the high school, um, a math teacher was super helpful and an English teacher was so helpful and they were like, look, like we think something's wrong here, like, what's going on with your kid?  Speaker 1 (06:21):So it was a combination of factors, combination of internet, combination of overwhelm in a house where you have kids with different learning styles and needs and we didn't have access to separate rooms and the internet capacity to do that. And that's when I think it just picked up. We had some bus incident bullying with my daughter being called effing Dora. Prior to this we had an incident at the middle school where my son was targeted and pulled in and said they had a video of him, uh, like basically like messing with gas caps of cars and siphoning gas. And when he said like, Hey, can you check the attendance? They're like, no, we have this video. So we had other experiences. Like I said, I, I just won't forget one of the teachers who I won't name here, just the callousness, the lack of engagement and uh, lack of understanding. And we didn't say anything about it. I'm not in charge of anybody else's how they're responding in a meeting. I just wanted to help my son get through, you know, this school year.  Speaker 1 (07:30):So as you can imagine, it was hard. It was really hard. And uh, fall of 2020 was brutal. And 2021 was just as hard. So things began to build up for us. Had trouble getting this particular teacher to accept assignments from my son, had trouble communicating with this person and I was working full-time. My husband ended up having to quit his job because we could not manage four children in school and all of us absent all the adults absent from the home. Of course, of course not. It's not meant, it's not meant to be like that. My husband would go into the school district or the school and ask for things either at the middle school or high school. Like he would often encounter a barrier just at, at the front desk. I mean, he's very dark brown and curly hair and speaks English, but you know, he has an accent I can understand and many, many people understand him. But, but in that frame, it became really hard for him to access the help he needed for our kids. Then I would have to send an email and when I would send an email, then there would be a response, but response to him, no. So this thing snowballed. Like we tried to have a meeting with the superintendent, tried to get this scheduled. It got put off until fall of 2022 September.  Speaker 1 (08:59):So we get a meeting scheduled, we get it on the calendar. I'm a licensed mental health therapist associate in Washington. So I have like clients scheduled, like, you know, scheduled weeks out. They have their time during the day. So when we scheduled this appointment with the superintendent, I made sure to be careful of my schedule, arranged it around her, and the day before she changes it by an hour. And that messed with me and my schedule and my client. But I said, you know what, I, I need to do this for my child. So I moved my client, I was able to move. My client showed up to the meeting. I think it was like an hour before the meeting, the superintendent emails like, oh, sorry, emergency came up. I won't be there.  Speaker 1 (09:43):We're talking like a year since the first incident happened. Over a year. Show up to the meeting. I had some community witnesses there. My husband and I were able to tell our story. There was some response, some compassion. Um, and outta that meeting, a principal of the high school invited, invited us to gather some of the families from the school. We set a date. The first day didn't work. And then we landed on November 22nd. It was the week of Thanksgiving last year. And I was like, man, I don't know if anybody's gonna come. And I was honestly afraid to invite people. I didn't know if other people, I knew other people were talking about issues, but I didn't know. I didn't know what I didn't know. We put the word out, text messages, kind of like called friends, but it was last minute. There wasn't a lot of notice. There was there was like, we made like a handmade flyer. Um, not a lot of social media. If you go back and look through my social media, there just wasn't a lot at that time.  Speaker 1 (10:48):Show up to the school. The meeting was supposed to start at six 30. I show up around six and I'm getting calls at like, people are like, Hey, where are you at? I'm like, Hey, the meeting doesn't start yet. And people are like, Hey, we're here. So we go in the meeting. Um, it becomes really apparent that we wanted to talk through some stories but also move towards solutions. We really wanted to move towards solutions in this first meeting, but what became really apparent is that the racism and the discrimination and the stories of the people that attended, which was somewhere between 40 and 50, it was so significant that we were not gonna get through just like three stories and people were gonna feel cared for almost three hours later. We ended this meeting. We did not get to solutions. We, we committed at that meeting to get to solutions, but we didn't get to them. So much trauma, so much harm happened in the last few years. And I'm not talking just North Kitsap High school people showed up that attended other schools in our districts because they had not had a way to communicate where, where they felt safe and heard.  Speaker 1 (11:57):And I left that meeting and for days I just was tired and sick and my body was achy. It's something, you know, it's kind of like one thing when you know your family's experiencing discrimination, but it's another thing when you hear the discrimination happening on all fronts with other families. And there were kids in this meeting, teenagers, and you know, when teenagers are in these meetings, they are normally like, uh, they're like looking at their phones, they're like texting, whatever. Like no one was doing that. No one. And so I just wanna point out that this is the history, this is where this came from. I didn't know these families had these stories. I had heard rumors and I wanted to hear from them, but I didn't know what we were opening up. And it wasn't just stories about Latinx families, it was stories about what happened to African American folks in school, what happened to native folks, what happened to Asian American folks in school?  Speaker 1 (13:02):There were stories, there were stories about people feeling suicidal, people having their mental health affected stories about not knowing how to apply to college, not having the resources to do it. And I won't repeat the trauma stories here because some of them are documented in the news articles in the notes. But what I wanna say is this movement in North Kitsap school district has a history. And it has a history far bigger than my family. It has a history far bigger than my kids. And also because we're exposing the history, there's blowback, there's payback, there's slander, there's gossip, there's other people like pushing in because justice has been stalled for so long. Equal access to education for so long, discrimination has just been a given. It's been a given. Racialized comments and stereotypes. I mean it's a given.  Speaker 1 (14:03):And I think at the beginning I had some naive idea that when we would come back to solutions in which we did get to solutions in February when we didn't hear back from the school district that somehow those solutions, they would, the school district would see them as proactive, as good, as caring, as like we're invested in our community, but that's not how it's gone. So I wanna tell more of that story later, but I just wanted to share the history of how November came to be. Some of the details of how, how it got planned, which was barely any plan at all. Not even like planning for an official interpreter. Thank God some people just showed up that could help with that. Because I can tell you that Luis and I were beat like so tired at the end of that. And I wanted to share where I've been for the last few months, been involved in organizing bridge building, doing a lot of apologizing, a lot of learning, a lot of crying, a lot of frustration and a lot of like working in systems that are actually not meant to prevent racial violence or discrimination.  Speaker 1 (15:15):They're actually meant to prevent equal access to education. These systems aren't looking for solutions. And so when we walk in with solutions, they're like, what the heck is this? But it, I don't think it has to be that way. I think our county can be different and that may be a fool's errand. I don't know. Sometimes I think it's very foolish. Hope is like that. It can feel very foolish. But I wanna acknowledge that there's been amazing community support and unity. We don't always think the same. We don't always have the right way to get there. We don't know how to get there. We have different problems sometimes we don't like the person we're organizing with. That's all true. But the fact is, we want something better for our kids. We want our kids to have access to education. We want our kids to live in a place where they feel like they belong and they don't need to resort to suicide and gun violence and they can come to us for help with anxiety and mental health issues, depression, sadness. I think we can't agree on those things and that's why I'm here in my community and that's why I've stayed because I believe that as humans we do share those things in common. And um, I hope you'll follow along on the next few podcasts as we tell more of these stories. And um, I'm just honored to be able to share a bit of this history with you today and go ahead and check out the notes. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.  

Listen to this fun conversationwith @indwell_movement and @abbymwong and myself@artoflivingcounselingcenter as we talk about attachment,somatic body movement, and group work in the context ofstory. I love these fierce, brilliant and playful woman and welove doing our Trauma Focused Narrative Group Trainingsand would love to have you join us for our upcoming springcohort. Deadline for registration is Friday February 24th. Sosign up today. You can find out more information and registerwhen you click the link in my bio or visitartoflivingcounseling.com under Trainings. We would love tojourney with you!The Teaching teach and coaches:@abbymwong@indwell_movement@luisdaniellecastillejo@rebecca.w.walston@artoflivingcounselingcenter#traumainformed#collectivetrauma#somaticmovement#attachment#inclusive#trainings#racialequity#continuingeducation

TELLING A TRU(ER) STORY MASTER CLASSAre you struggling with a traumatic experience or maybe trying to better understand how your past keeps impacting your present?  Are you in a helping profession (mental health professionals,  ministers, spiritual directors, teachers, mentors) and want to learn how to assist others that are navigating traumatic experiences?Introducing a NEW 2-Track professional training from The Art of Living Counseling Center.Final registration closes on February 24, 2023. Don't miss out. https://artoflivingcounseling.com/professional-training/ Cyndi Mesmer Speaker & Facilitator Cyndi Mesmer, LCPC identifies as a white cisgender, able-bodied, straight woman. She is the clinical director and co-owns, with her husband Steve, The Art of living Counseling Center in Crystal Lake, IL. Cyndi worked as a teacher, supervisor and trainer at The Allender Center in Seattle WA. Cyndi has worked in all levels of care for mental health.She has about 30 years of experience working with individuals, families and groups. She primarily works with clients working through trauma, both past and present. She sees the world through the lens of story and invites others to engage their stories in a way that brings more freedom and life, both personal and communal. She is a seeker of racial justice and advocate for other oppressed groups believing that there should be equal rights and flourishing for all humans. You can read more at www.artoflivingcounseling.com Rebecca Wheeler Walston Guest Speaker & Facilitator Rebecca Wheeler Walston holds a Master of Arts in Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary and currently serves as a Fellow with The Allender Center, facilitating Story Workshops and NFTC. Rebecca also comes to this work through The Impact Movement, a college ministry to Black students, as Impact partners with The Allender Center to bring this work to BIPOC spaces in creative and innovative ways. She lives in Williamsburg, VA with her husband Vaughn and their two children, where Vaughn works as an Engineer and Rebecca runs a Law Practice and serves as General Legal Counsel for The Impact Movement, Inc. Danielle S. Castillejo Guest Speaker & Facilitator Danielle holds an MA in Counseling in Psychology from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor Associate in Washington State, story lover, owner of Way-Finding Therapy, podcaster, avid reader, writer, adventurer and advocate.She works and advocates from an anti-oppression lens, holding space for hope, love and repair. She loves the anticipation of Spring and Summer in the Northwest – the long days and sunlight we miss in the dark winters. You can easily find her out on a trail, laughing, cooking with her kids, or working in the yard.If you choose to reach out and we embark on a counseling journey together, it will be one that is co-created. I do not believe that I have all of the answers, nor all of the ideas or intellect to guide you. I trust my body and intuition. I trust your body and intuition. We will work with both narrative and somatic narrative. I believe our bodies tell a story. You can read mine at www.wayfindingtherapy.com DATES OF TRAININGFinal registration closes on February 24, 2023.DATES OF TRAINING & TOPICSMarch 10, 2023 9:00am – 4:00pm CTMarch 24, 2023 9:00am – 4:00pm CTApril 21, 2023 9:00am – 4:00pm CTMay 12, 2023 9:00am – 4:00pmCTWe are excited to offer two interconnected tracks for this training:Track 1:  The Teaching Experience.  Track 1 is for those participants who want to be further educated about trauma and traumas impact on an individual.  There will be four teaching sessions over four Fridays in the Spring of 2023 (see dates above). Each sessions will include interactive teaching and discussion as well as a live story facilitation.  If you are signing up for The Teaching Experience of the Telling a Tru(er) Story Spring Training you will have access to the live virtual training as well as, access to watch or re-watch the recorded teachings at your leisure.  Tier 1 is recommended for individuals who would like to gain further understanding about the nature of trauma, and how it affects us.   It is open to an unlimited number of registrants and no prior experience is needed. Track 2:  The Story Group Experience.  Track 2 includes everything in Track 1 but adds more in depth training through participation in six, 2-hour Story Groups.  Participants signing up for Track 2 will have the opportunity to practice what they are learning in the Track 1 teaching through written story work as well as practicing engaging another persons story of harm.  With this Story Group Experience participants will gain experience both as a reader of a personal narrative and as a Co-facilitator of a fellow group members personal narrative.  As a reader you will gain experience writing two personal narratives, reading your stories within a group setting and receiving feedback and care around your personal narrative.  As a co-facilitator you will gain experience engaging two group members personal narratives and receive coaching and feedback on your facilitation experience from your coach.  The coaching and feedback will be offered in real-time as the facilitation happens and through one follow up Private Coaching Session.  The Story Group Experience is recommended for those participants who have some prior story work experience and would like additional practice engaging stories of harm.  Track 2 is also appropriate for those participants with little to no experience but, have a strong desire to learn how to engage trauma in a group setting and/or want to become a Story Group Facilitator in their place of influence.  For this Spring Cohort we are taking only 30 participants for The Story Group Experience, 15 of these registration spots will be reserved for our BIPOC participants.For Track 2 Participants:You will have (6) 2 hour groups in addition to the Friday teaching schedule.  See schedule below to choose your preferred group times.  You will be with the same group for all 6 sessions and there are 6 participants per group maximum. Track 2 Groups Day and Time Options: (When you apply, you will be asked to pick your first three preferences.)Friday's 4pm- 6pm CST (March 10th, March 17th, March 24th , April 14th, April 21st &  May 12th)Fridays 6pm – 8pm CST (March 10th, March 24th , April 7th, April 21st, April 28th &  May 12th)Fridays 5pm – 7pm CST (March 10th, March 24th , March 31st, April 21st, April 28th &  May 12th)Saturday's 8am – 10am CST (March 11th, March 25, April 15, April 22nd, May 6th & May 13th)Saturday's 10am – Noon CST (March 11, March 25, April 15th, April 22nd, May 6th & May 13th) 

DanielleGood morning. Welcome to the ARise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, agenda and healing. My name is Danielle Castillejo, and I'm coming to you solo today. Uh, it's the year 2023 and I don't know how many of you have actually looked at the date and been like, what happened to the time? I know. As 2023 started and the last year since 2020 arrived, I, I had some trepidation and I still have that trepidation. So stepping into the new year and there are gonna be some guests coming up and some podcasts coming up. But living in the reality of post pandemic life meant that over Christmas break this year, uh, my kids out at Christmas break, there was a lot of sickness that went through our home. We still haven't tested positive for Covid. Um, we didn't test positive for flu, but we were diagnosed with a cough.And that cough actually took out my entire voice for over a week. So I'm just aware that I think during the pandemic, there was this sense, like in the thick of it, in 2020, in 2021, that we were in this state of the world where sickness was alive. It was active and literally physical sickness that would threaten our health. And then the racial disparities and the racial uprising that these were things that were able to come to light. And I think there was a sense of, and I remember talking about it with Maggie and talking about it with other friends, like, actually, we're not in post-trauma right now. This is an ongoing thing that's happening. So, I think one of the things I wondered stepping into 2023 was whether or not I would feel that we were post pandemic and it was interesting to become or get kind of a big illness at the end of 2022.I remember thinking, I wonder what Covid feels like and having some panic around, is my my throat sore because I never had that experience? Or is this cough? Can I breathe? Just the panic around that was still very present and I haven't experienced covid 19, I wasn't infected by it. Um, so I, I think that that was just an interesting response to me. And as 2023 started, I had this feeling that I was just going to move into the year slow. That's what I told myself. And there's no criticism or judgment. A lot of people make words for the year or gain some kind of resolution or goals or setting standards. And I do actually periodically evaluate where I'm at and what I'm doing and things I'm working toward, towards and moving towards.And I just have never been able to write a word down or set up New Year's resolutions. I always feel that if I do that, it will fall shorter. I will fail. So it's kind of a little internal battle with myself, but I, I do think I'm walking into 2023 with a sense of deliberateness and maybe a little bit of fear and a like very keenly aware that there are so many things about a new year that I don't know. I think in the past, like when I was in grad school, pre-grad school, there were just things that seemed for sure, it seemed for sure that the kids would go back to school. It seemed for sure that I would be able to show up to my classes. It seemed for sure that we would have work, and all of those things are in flux.Not that they're shutting down schools anymore, but will we be well enough to do this? Will we feel well enough? Will we feel safe? And I, I do wonder if we're in this transition phase from pandemic to post pandemic, and I still don't know if we're out of some of those mentalities last weekend and had the great honor and privilege of going to the Seattle School and listening to a dear friend, um, Phil Allen Jr. Talk about his book Open Wounds and the Prophetic Lens. He was a keynote speaker and there were so many people I haven't seen in a long time, or maybe I've just seen over Zoom. And so I found myself, you know, people walking up to me wanting to be social, starting a conversation, and we're engaging over just a certain topic. And as they're talking to me, someone else walks up and says Hi.(04:45):And I didn't know the social cues. I didn't know how to relate to the person that was, I was in deep conversation with. And that was in an instant. Hmm. And I didn't know how to switch gears and pay attention to the next person. I'm so outta practice. I mean, I've been getting together with friends and obviously talking with my family, but in a situation where there's many people that I would like to connect with or don't realize that I would like to connect with, I was just like, socially, I felt socially inept. I did not know what I was doing. I was jumping from conversation to conversation. I was a little bit mortified that I was allowing myself to be interrupted when I was having a good conversation with one person. And so I'm just aware that like, I don't know what to do in that situation. I don't have practice at it. I have to reengage somehow. Um, I'm outta practice. So there's just so many layers to coming out of a period of isolation. Maybe you weren't someone that went into isolation. Maybe you, you were able to have like a pod or people that you related with. ButI think there's something that still feels in the air to me that feels siloed, that maybe when I walk to the grocery store and I've seen it with other people, like people that know each other, that I know, know each other, and they don't say hi. I'm like, what is going on there? What is happening for us in our individual spaces and the places that we have maintained connection? How have we been able to do that? Is it by miracle? Is it through intentional effort? Um, I don't know. I, I don't know the answer. Been thinking a lot about how the younger parts of ourselves have been both likely activated by those periods of isolation. And how, what do we do with that now? I think, I mean, I think, I mean, just even in those conversations in that group, just feeling very young and very excited and very happy to be with everybody and literally not knowing what to do.And do I spiral into shame and feel like, well, I can't enter another social, so social situation again, no. I mean, I'm gonna do it. Um, but the temptation is to beat myself up a little bit, if I'm honest. So I mean, that is not the most serious of scenarios that have happened, but it is one scenario that has happened and I keep, I keep returning to it. Um, and this new year also brought about, uh, some changes in my family. Uh, we had, uh, a close family member, uh, like a second mother to my husband pass away, and she passed away this week suddenly.(07:51):And I say suddenly, but I, we all knew that she was sick. But there was some, I think, reluctance to engage, uh, the despair that would come if we acknowledged that, that she was close to death. I, I felt it in my own body. I felt it in conversations with my husband and my family. And then when she died, it was like, everything just paused and I felt paralyzed. And I looked at the calendar, actually 2023, and my husband looked at me. He's like, I don't know if 2023 is gonna be okay. Like, I don't know if this is gonna be a good year. And so again, I just returned to that, like living in the unknown. And as the grief has settled in around this dear woman, I have to admit, I haven't really wanted to engage it. I've pushed it away. I've laughed. I'd made jokes, I've gone out to eat, and maybe that is my way of grieving.I think it just didn't fit for me that there would be more grief in this year. I, I, I think I was a little bit like our family. Like we know there's some sickness in the air. We know there's still a lingering tension. We know things aren't well, and yet I didn't wanna touch it. I didn't want to. And I, you know, I've been, as you know, my family is split apart for the moment because, you know, part of family members are in Mexico grieving, and then I'm here, uh, holding down the fort. I just, I think about that. I think about the in between, between spaces. I think about the spaces between life and death and how often those are just these tenuous spaces that can go either way at any moment for a any reason.(09:53):And so, 2023 E even though we're saying, and like, I'm feeling like it's post pandemic, I just, it feels like something shifted in the air a few years ago. And there's going to be a, like a more living into this tension I haven't ever done or recorded my thoughts in a podcast on my own before. And I decided to do it because I really felt like it was important to kick the year off with some, for me, just being honest of where I am and recognizing those limitations and, and limiting that tension, I think forces me to, to acknowledge the limitations and find, like search for some way to bless them, search for some way to understand them.(10:48):Yeah, the tension between not knowing and knowing between the joy of being able to be together, not knowing how to do it. The tension of there is still going to be death in 2023, and there will still be life. And, and what do I do with those younger places in me that wanna cry? I wanna laugh, wanna, wanna ignore, wanna move on quickly or wanna, or just want to like run around at the park and swing on swings. I don't, I don't know what it is about stepping into a new year, but every year for a while, January has felt long. And I think I'm appreciating that. I'm appreciating it as a time for me to hibernate and also warm up, warm up to a year with my family, warm up to the gift of, of more space to live and to breathe and to be with those that are dying and to be with myself as things die in my own life or come to life too.(12:05):So, I don't know if you're li if you listen to this, like where you find yourself today, where, where you're at, if you're in that social awkward space of like, if you've moved past that, if you got it together, if you do find yourself like, hey, I got sick again. Maybe you got covid again. Maybe you got the flu. Maybe you got a cough like my family. Or, or maybe someone did die in your family and, and after everything that survived over the last three years, you're like, damn, why? Now? I think that's what I was thinking and why this good person, why now? Or why this job? Why now something that I've worked for? Or why is this system not working out the way I wanted it to? Or why do I have to return and fight for justice again in 2023? I thought we did that. I thought, I thought we moved something. Hmm. Excuse me. If you find yourself there, you're not alone. If you find yourself asking why or you find yourself repeating or you find yourself on a track and not able to embrace those younger parts of you or to that you find yourself in shame, you're not alone.(13:23):And so I, I wanna I wanna just normalize that. And, and then I wanna, I do wanna encourage you to, to, to find community, to be in community, to reach out to people, to say hi to the person that's making your coffee, to commit to socially awkward moments and laugh about them later. To send an email after you're in a socially awkward moment and say, Hey, I don't know what happened, but I let our conversation get interrupted. And I really do wanna finish a talk with you to allow yourself to cry when one more negative thing happens. Maybe it's a job layoff, maybe it's a death. Maybe it's someone's diagnosed with cancer. Maybe it's long-term covid to allow that one more chance to shed some tears. I don't think that we're out of the grieving process of the pandemic. I don't, I don't think that, I don't think that. And I think it will keep, keep showing up in different ways. Um, those are my thoughts for the beginning of 2023. And in the next week or so, you're going to hear about a town hall that's been organized across ethnic and, uh, diverse communities in my county and the town hall is toBring, bring awareness and advocacy and change into our school system. I, I don't know if we can change things, but we are going to try. And so that's, that's one of the next things you're gonna be hearing, you'll be hearing from more community members and I really look forward to being with you. We're also gonna have a couple podcasts on spiritual abuse and the intersection of that, and racial trauma and sexual trauma. Um, yeah, so I'm excited about this new year in the podcast season and, you know, if you've signed on to listen and you've been so gracious as to download this podcast, I just wanna say thank you. Um, I know Maggie and I have been blown away by the support and the feedback and the, the ways we've engaged our community through, um, making and forming and using a podcast. So, uh, happy New Year and I will catch you in a week or two.          Announcements

    Danielle (00:00:37):Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on faith, race, healing, and justice. And I wanna welcome you to this panel conversation. I'm about to have, uh, just stunning women doing wonderful work in this community and in the areas of justice in government. Listen in,Kali (00:01:07):All right. I am Kali Jensen. I am a licensed mental health counselor in the state of Washington. Grew up in Washington. Um, I am obvious I'm a white American. I am German, native American, and French Canadian. And, and yeah, coming to you on the land of the Suquamish as we enter today.(00:01:33):My name is Jessica Guidry. I'm the Equity Program manager at the Kids at Public Health District. I also like Kaylee, um, joined this meeting from the land of the Suquamish. I actually live, um, and what was, which is still the, the Port Madison Reservation. So closer to Indianola. Um, and I, I guess ethnic ethnically I am, um, Asian, English, scotch Irish, and maybe some other British isles there. But, uh, um, I actually grew up in Bangkok, Thailand, and I've been in the US though for a long time. And I was born in the States(00:02:08):Next, um, Maria Fergus. I'm the community en Engagement specialist at, uh, Kita Public Health District. I've been in this role for, um, a little bit over a month. And one of the reasons why I applied for this job is because I, uh, I know that last year the Kita Public Health District declared racism at public health crisis. Um, and I wanted to be part of what they were doing. I, my pronouns are her, and she, I was born in Mexico, but I grew up in California. English is my second language, and I've been in Washington state for about seven years and working with our communities, um, our Spanish speaking communities as a volunteer for different organizations since the end of 2015.Well, good morning everyone. Um, I stepped away cause you know what I was doing, but, um, , uh, just bring, kinda bring me up to speed. We just doing our introductions.Just so you are, where you're located, um, what you're up to, and, um, yeah. And then we'll jump in.(00:03:34):Okay. Well, good morning everyone. Good afternoon now. Um, my name is Karen Vargas and, um, I am on Bainbridge Island, um, working with our kids across Kitsap County. I am, um, one of, uh, the co-founders, um, for Latch, uh, living Life Leadership and Kitsap Black Student Union. Um, we have been working over 30 plus years with our school districts, um, with our multicultural advisory council here on Bainbridge Island, working on equity issues, uh, really since I, um, moved here from the East Coast. So, um, what we're working on now with Kitsap Race Coalition is to, um, to have our, our county have a commission on Truth and Reconciliation that would, uh, actually deal with some of the issues that we see manifesting here in our county, um, with our bipo communities and with our students of color, uh, within the school districts and in the community.Um, and, and hoping that we, we would be able to, um, move our communities forward in a healthier way, to be able to address some of the, the issues that have been, um, you know, uh, showing up, whether it's in our churches or whether it's in our, our communities or on our jobs or, or in our school districts, even in our health districts. You know, how do we move forward when there has been, um, these type of, of issues that continue to manifest, you know? And I think that when we can move forward doing intervention and prevention, um, to address these issues, it would help us to reconcile them more in, in a healthy way. Um, and so, um, that's kind of the work that we've been working on. And so,Danielle (00:05:49):Thanks. Um, well, welcome everybody. I, I know we kind of all have connected and collaborated around, um, what is happening in Kitsap County. And perhaps if you're listening, you're not in Kitsap County, but you are in a county or a, a town or a section of a town, even a larger town. We, we all have these, like, there's like the 30,000 foot view of like the larger area where we're at. And we have these smaller cultural microcosms I think that happen in the areas where we actually physically root our bodies in housing and, um, business and life and school and our raise our children. And so we're coming to you from one location. Um, it's not, it's not gonna be the same as every location, but hopefully what we talk about can be something that we can, we can learn from you if you reach out and we hope you can learn just from us as we have a conversation.But Kaylee and I, like, we've been really close since the pandemic. She helped me survive the pandemic. She had her office next to mine and we would yell at each other down the hall or, um, check in, especially when all of our clients were online. And we had started these groups. One of the first groups we ever started, um, I think it was like the second or third group right after the murder of George, George Floyd, to engage white people that identify as white or in a white body, um, and what that means to their racial identity. And so Kaylee and I started these groups and we jumped in cuz I said, Hey Kaylee, do you wanna do this? And she's like, yeah, sure. And we jumped in, we're like, whoa, we don't know if we know what we're doing. And then pretty soon we're like, actually, I think we don't know what we're doing, but we do know what we're doing in some ways.So offering good care, listening, um, reflecting stories, being witness to stories, engaging, uh, the traumas that have been that turn into weapons against bodies of color. So those, some of the ways Kayleigh and I have talked about things and, you know, we both Kayleigh and I both have students in the local school system and have had kids that are, uh, part of marginalized communities or adjacent to marginalized communities. And it's, we've also noticed the mental health of our students and our families and, you know, become more and more passionate about it because obviously why it might not be obvious, but it's something we deal with in our everyday real life and, and we care deeply for, I think I can say that on behalf of both of us. But Kayleigh, you can speak for yourself obviously, but that's how I come to the conversation as a, a Mexican woman in the town of Poulsbo, Washington on Suquamish land, married to an immigrant, and, um, we speak Spanish and English at home. And so just, you know, just curious to hear, you know, how that intersects with your different areas of work and, and your passions here in Kitsap County.Kali (00:08:59):Well, I guess I can go first just cuz Danielle was just talking a lot about me, . Uh, but yes, uh, Danielle did invite me into starting groups and I went with her with fear and trembling. Um, had done some work on my own, around my own racism for a while. My graduate program, this at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology really, um, helped me to begin that work at a deeper level. And so then I did some work on my own, but had a real awareness when I started groups around racism that I definitely have racism still a part of my world as I grew up in a very white, uh, community and Spokane. And, um, as we began those groups, we did predominantly reach out to other white people or people in white passing bodies and, um, have found some like goodness in diving deeper into people's stories around racism.And that's kind of where we started, um, wondering with people around like, when did you notice your own racial identity? When, when did you become aware of racism? Um, kind of going all the way back to the beginning to help people make connections to like, what is still going on inside their bodies when they try to have these hard conversations with people in the community. Um, so I have learned a lot. I still have a lot to learn. Um, and along with what Danielle said, I also am a mental health therapist and work with a lot of teenagers in our community here in Kitsap County from different school districts. Plus like she said, I have some teenage children. All of my children are white, um, and, and have diverse friend groups. But I have become increasingly, well, I've always been concerned about the issues of racism in our community.I, I remember as a young little girl calling it out in my own parents, and that didn't always go well. Um, but then it was very under the surface as a white person, uh, you didn't see it as overtly as it has become now in 2020 since the election of Donald Trump, the, like, overt, blatant racism has, uh, been shocking. And yet it's always been there. So, um, but as I work with my own children and then work with students in my practice, I'm just, I am deeply concerned about the mental health of our kids. I think it's hard enough as an adult to go through these past few years, but I am concerned about our teens and what they are facing, um, of all races. I I think even my white daughter is very disturbed by the racial slurs that she constantly hear in the hallway and doesn't really know how to even go about addressing it or feel safe enough to even say anything. Um, so that's part of why I'm here today. And, um, had the privilege of going to a meeting, uh, last weekend with Kitsap Race. And so, yeah, I, I just, I hope for continued leadership amongst adults to like help our students and help our communities, even our adults in our communities, especially. I have a passion for the white people in our community. I help them be able to take steps forwards to be able to sit in these conversations and, and be productive and not as harmful. So that's how I enter this work.Speaker 5 (00:12:34):So I entered this work, um, because I grew up in California and it was very diverse. Um, and when I moved up here to Washington, uh, there just wasn't as much diversity, especially in the PAL area. And my daughter, um, who was a sophomore at the time, was invited to join the North Kids Up Equity Council. And so I started participating in that and started hearing stories, and I started working with the parents and children that are Spanish speaking. And, well, I kept hearing more stories and, uh, realized that I needed to be a little bit more proactive. And so I, I joined, um, stand up for racial justice search and I attended some other meetings, got some training, realized that I have a lot of internalized racism and racist behaviors myself and what ency ideology that, uh, I hadn't been aware of. Um, that was part of my thinking.And so, um, over time I continued to stay involved. At the beginning of this year, I heard about the student direct equity campaign under a base and became a adult, um, volunteer to support the, the students that were in the campaign and have been doing that since then. Um, also participated in the race forward, uh, healing together, meeting that we had this last, um, two weekends ago with, uh, with the race and try and stay as active as I can in the community to to hear, um, hear the stories. So I, I know what's going on and just stay updated and what's going on in my community.Jessica (00:14:41):Years, you know, the health district was, you were very, you were very light can Oh, okay. Is this better? Yeah, sorry about that. That, um, so how I got started in this work, so for 13 and a half years at the, you know, at the health district, I was their public health emergency preparedness and response program manager. And to be honest, I didn't really address equity head-on, um, in the emergency management field. Um, we, instead of using the term, you know, equity injustice, we used terms like access and functional needs, which to me doesn't really get to the core of the issue, but that was kind of the verbiage. But first it was vulnerable population then at risk and things like that. But it wasn't until, you know, the pandemic, um, that my role was able to switch a little. Um, I supervised initially our Covid vaccine equity liaison, and that was the first time at the health district that we had somebody with the word equity in their title.And she was specifically hired, her name was, but this was the first time we hired someone to specifically look at differences and, and how we can address those differences and outcomes and access. And, and so it was really exciting to have Holly on board. And as Holly was doing outreach with the community, um, and she built this Vaccine Equity collaborative, she started hearing from folks, you know, you know, this is great that the health district, you know, wants to address equity and vaccine, but what are you going to do about racism? And before the pandemic? Well, um, you know, we, we've talked about it and in public health circles, racism as a public health issue was kind of c was circulating, right? But I think it wasn't until the pandemic when we saw the differences in, um, who was getting hospitalized.You know, the covid who was getting sick because of covid and who, um, didn't get vaccinated because of access issues to stress of government and, you know, rightful distress of government, um, where all this came about. So when Holly heard this feedback and heard, you know, are, you know, is, is public health going to claim, um, racism as a public health crisis? You know, she came to me and some other folks and asked about this and we said, you know, yes, let's talk about this as an agency. And our leadership was very supportive and wanted to know more about declaring racism as a public health crisis. So, you know, at that point I was more of a cheerleader more than anything else. You know, I was involved in some groups kite race or you know, that, um, which Aku helped found, um, you know, equity, um, race and community engagement coalition kind of, you know, here and there.But when the Public Health Board declared racism a public health crisis, that was in response to community demand or a request, if you will. Um, and I could talk more about how that process came about, but as a result of that resolution, the health district actually allocated resources to equity. Before equity was more of, you know, if, if certain programs were, sorry, I use the word program. If certain teams within the health district were passionate about equity, they would incorporate it, but it was not, um, universal within the health district. And we didn't have like a, a, a shared terminology, things like that, or shared expectation even that we would address equity. Um, but with the, the, the resolution, it has several commitments in it. And one of them has to do with actually having staff. And this is really important because other resolutions across the country don't have commitments.They don't allocate resources. And just telling a government agency, oh yes, you'll handle equity without putting a budget line item means that it'll be kind of an afterthought, right? Or it's kind of like another layer among other layers. So this resolution said that, you know, you'll hire a community liaison and what our leadership ended up doing is say, no, this needs to be a separate program. We're going to hire a program manager first. So that was really important with that resolution. Another thing, another component of that resolution is that the health district will have, and I think the, um, certain training, and I believe the topics were, um, cultural competency, anti-racism and health literacy plus other topics. But those are the three topics, if I remember correctly, that were called out in the resolution. And the, and then one of the other commitments was that we would co-create solutions to systemic inequities with our community partners.And the reason why I said this is pretty huge for us is because, you know, often we look at health topics like health, excuse me, like healthy eating, active living, smoking cessation, or food safety, but actually dealing with poverty, racism, you know, I don't think we've, no, no, I might not be being, I might be unfair about this, but I don't think we've necessarily ha handled its head on, right? We've maybe gone to some housing meetings, but really more like in our limited public health capacity. So to me, this co-creation of solutions with community partners is huge. And I, and I do believe that often in government, we think we know best, right? And so we're like, oh, well, we're gonna do our research and we're gonna find best practices. But instead, you know, our community often has the answers to our, to our, to the issues that we have.It's just bringing them to the table, giving them equal voice and you know, honestly compensating them and treating them like consultants and, you know, a as equals, not just, oh, we're gonna, you know, get community input and then we're done, kind of thing. But that, that continued partnership. So anyway, um, so when this resolution passed, um, then my position was, was created. I applied for it and I was very lucky to get it. Um, and I, I started in this position full-time about last October or so, the resolution declaring racism of public health crisis start, um, it, that, that passed in May, 2021. So it's been about a almost a year and a half now. And to my knowledge, we're still the only governmental entity in Kitsap that's really addressed this and has staffing for it. Now, this might change because I, I, I'm not saying that the health district started anything, and I think really it's more the advocacy of folks like [inaudible] and, and Kitsap Race and all these other organizations that are pushing government.But I think we, we may start to see city governments actually investing in hiring and equity, uh, either race equity or all equity consultants or, or, um, staff member to really push that issue forward in their org organization. Um, so in this past year, um, there have been a couple things that I've been working on. So one is looking at our internal structure and our internal culture. Um, we don't talk about, you know, a year ago we didn't talk about equity as much. Um, so it was doing, you know, as, as designing employee training, meeting with all our different, prog all of our different teams. So talk about equity because, uh, oh, is Jessica, you know, the politically correct police, is she going to white shame me? So it's really the, the first year I had to really build those relationships. And luckily, because I've been at the health district so darn long, people knew, oh, you know, they, they were familiar with me.They, they knew that I wasn't just gonna shut them down. And then, and, and just being present, and as I talked with different teams, I realized, you know, they, they do have equity mindsets, but they just don't call it equity. But we have some teams who are really focused on poverty, but they might have actually had the conversation about how does racism affect poverty? How is that a driver for poverty? So, you know, anyway, so, so with this, so we have this internal bucket of work. So looking at training and, and right now our, our first training with the employees is gonna deal with identity and power. We're calling it positionality training. And the idea is that our, our training has to deal with the individual, the organization, the community, and the society. So that's, so we're building a training program based on that. We did do an internal equity assessment to figure out what we can do better.And, and I don't if I had to do about this Maria, but honestly, one of the biggest takeaways from that assessment was our staff doesn't know how we react to community input related to our priorities. So that needs to change, you know, either it's, it's a lack of awareness in our agency, or maybe we don't do it enough. So there, there's that piece. And then with, with community partnerships, you know, really trying to look at how we engage with community and how we see them as partners differently. Um, so the fact, like one thing I I also encourage, like me and Marina do, is just to be at community events without an agenda. It's not a grant deliverable. And actually, Aku really, um, helped bring this light for me. And I, and I should have realized this years ago, but you know, when, when Holly, the Vaccine Equity Collaborative, um, excuse me, the Vaccine Equity Liaison.So her position was eliminated due to, you know, that, that that phase of work was done. But I think what was missed was the community impact, because she built such amazing relationships in the thick of the pandemic where people were really looking for someone to trust in government. And I remember in Aku, I I, I think about this a lot, um, when we had our, her, um, goodbye party, I had one person, a community leader who was angry about it. Yes. And rightfully so. And, and you know, one of the things I've had to learn about in, in this position is not to be defensive and not to be like, well, our leadership didn't see enough work for a person. And just to be like, you know what? It is okay to be angry. I'm angry. I don't want her to leave. This was not my decision.I was not consulted about this. And, and, and that's, and, and, and I think what, what I'm, what I'm hoping to build and, and, and, and get some feed, you know, and, and, and, and build my own muscle and getting community feedback without having to be like, well, our agency policy exist. So at that meeting, not only was I not chewed out, I should say, but, um, I had someone speak very passionate to me, and he's said, Jessica, this is not about you. I'm like, no, I, I see that. And I said, you know, so acknowledging that hurt and letting my agency know also, hey, it hurts when your, when your main contact an organization leaves, you can't just replace that. So there's that piece. But then even a Kue telling me, you know, Jessica, you know, with, and, and I'm paraphrasing cuz a a kue says so much more eloquently than I do, you know, in government you have these grant deliverables and you go to community and you ask community to help and community will do the labor for you, you know, doing outreach, looking for places, for example, to do vaccine clinics and other stuff.But then when your grant deliverables are done and the grant funding's over, you leave. So that really stuck with me. And, um, one of the great things about how our equity program is funded is not funded by grants. And so one of the big things, you know, for us to build relationships is to go to meetings that are not just grant driven. Um, just to listen. So for example, Marie and I are gonna be going to the com, the, the community and police policing together, you know, the PACT meeting that, um, uh, pastor Richmond Johnson and, and, uh, partnering for Youth Achievement and others are having this, this, this, um, this week. I don't know if the health district has ever participated in that, but in order for us to know what's important to the community, we actually have to be there in meetings. So that's, and, and I'm so sorry to be taking up so much time, but this is trying some of the ways I'm trying to change how we do things at the health district.The funny thing is, and I get asked, well, Jessica, can you send this to so-and-so? And it's like, you know, yes, but do you know how much we invest in going to meetings and building those relationships? But we're, we're seeing re returns. But another thing that we're doing is we are launching what we call the Health Equity Collaborative. So I mentioned that during the pandemic we had the Vaccine Equity Collaborative. It was very limited though. Cause it was just looking at vaccine with the Health Equity Collaborative, there is no deadline for this because health inequities exist and they will continue to exist until we really address those hard issues. Right. So I'm really excited about the Self Equity collaborative because the collaborative will decide what topic we talk about. And that's that piece I was talking about, about co-creating solutions. Um, it's not the Health District saying, oh, we need to focus on someone that's public healthy.No, we're gonna, um, in, in January come together, you know, we'll look at data, we'll, we'll listen to stories, we'll listen to input from the collaborative members and then figure out we wanna address. And then, you know, I I, I've also committed to Maria in my time to actually address and, and support the work that the collaborative will eventually think of. Um, but what's different about that collaborative also is that we're paying people who participate and are not being paid there by their organizations. That is not something that we typically do in government. But, um, some of you may know that the Public Health Board expanded last year. No, actually it was earlier this year, excuse me, due to a state law that passed last year. And we now have non-elected members, which is huge because across the country you saw politics getting involved in public health.Now we have, um, now we actually have five, I think, new members. And it's amazing. So we now have a member, so we have a member on, on our board from each of our neighboring tribes. We only had to have one per law, but our board decided that they wanted to have a spot for the Suquamish tribe and the Port Gamble ALM tribe. I just found out today that our Port Gamble ALM tribe position is filled. And the person's gonna be Jolene Sullivan, who's a health services director with the Port Gamble Skm tribe from the Squamish tribe. And, and, and she's sorry. And Jolene is a tribal member of the Port Gamble Skm tribe, with the Squamish tribe. We're gonna have the health services director there. His name is, um, Steven Kutz, and he's a member of the Cowlitz Tribe. So he is originally from, you know, southwest Washington.And then we have, um, Drayton Jackson and who's really ex and that's really exciting. He's on our board. We also have Dr, um, Michael Watson. He's with, uh, Virginia Mason, Franciscan Health. And then we have, um, Dr. Um, Taras, oh my gosh. Kirk sells who's, I believe, a public health research researcher. So we have this expanded board, and our board members who are not elected are also being compensated. So we followed off that model because, you know, sometimes it's kind of a wait and see. But that was precedent setting for us. And I think because we are compensating our board members, were non-elected, we have this, I was able to, to, to propose to our leadership, Hey, if we're gonna be doing this health equity collaborative, we need to pay our, you know, our, our folks who are not being paid by their organizations. There's national precedent for this.You're seeing that more national, you know, nationally with governments paying their consultants, right? We pay our d e i consultants, we pay strategic planning consultants. You know, Akua is a huge, um, community consultant and we need to start paying folks like that. But like her, like, you know, um, all the other folks are giving us input. So anyways, so we have this collaborative, we had our first meeting earlier this month, and we're having our, our visioning meeting in January. And Aya, I remember, you know, earlier this year you talked about how as a community we need to have this visioning process. And one piece of feedback I got from the collaborative meeting that we had earlier this month was, well, Jessica, we need to also include Citi and county officials. Cuz the only government officials at that meeting we're public health folks. So in the future, you know, also bringing other governmental folks.So there, there's a, there's a lot going on. Um, and, and I think another thing, and, and I promise I'll, I'll stop is, um, is elevating the concerns of our community within the health district. So, for example, and I really wanna give Maria credit for this because of her passion on working with youth. I, I, you know, I, I, I don't mentor youth. I have my two kiddos, and that's kind of the, the, the extent of, of, of my impact on youth. But, um, you know, it was through conversations with her, you know, meeting you Danielle, and, and hearing about other community meetings, you know, concerned about mental health, especially of our Bipo youth. Um, you know, elevating that to our leadership, letting our leadership know, hey, this is an a concern. And what's exciting is, um, when I mentioned this to our community health director, Yolanda Fox, she's like, well, you know, this other department, you know, our chronic disease prevention team, they may have funds to help with these kind of initiatives.So it's also networking within my own agency and Maria and my agency to see who can help with these, with these issues and figuring out, okay, well how can this also fit? Because the health district is also doing strategic planning, um, starting early next year. We're also participating in Kitsap community resources, um, community needs assessment. Ray and I both have been note takers and, um, contributors to their focus groups, for example. But then also I've been doing some keen form of interviews for Virginia Mason, Franciscan Health, um, community assessment. So we're hearing from community leaders, but then also going to community meetings about their needs. And we're trying to elevate that as well to our, to our leadership. And that's, so there's a lot going on from the health district, I think. Kuya, you're up.Akuyea (00:30:32):Yes. Oh my God. Go Jessica, go run, girl, run you and Maria, this is how we elevate, this is how we transform. This is how we begin to shift the paradigm for the opportunity to be heard. Oh, cross, we are gonna level the playing field for leveling. When I say level, I mean our young people, our parents, our community, our school districts, our, you know, health districts, our government. How do we do this collective work? Especially when you're dealing with historical institutionalized racism that we know is a crisis across the line. I don't care. It's a, not just in the health district, it's in our community, it's in our school, it's in our families, it's in our history. It's in the d n a of this country. So how do we begin to address that and move that where we can begin to reconcile, we know the history is there for us to sit here and, and, and act as if that this has not been a problem in an issue in our nation for hundreds.And it is not just that, it's in our nation, it our, our institutions. Were built on it. We, we, we have these systemic pieces that we have to deal with. That's why it was important when we started Kitsap e rates that we said, we gotta look at our schools, we gotta look at our health districts. We gotta look at our city government. We gotta look at our faith-based organizations, which Danielle, you know, that it exists within all of these institutions. We gotta look at our businesses that say, and I said, you know, when you come in and, and you try to do this type of work, and especially these organizations have in their mission statement that we're undoing racism, or we got, we're gonna be looking at equity, inclusion, diversity, multicultural. And they say that this is all within their mission and they check the box, but there's no accountability.There is no moving these, these issues to a place. If it's not in there, where is their, uh, district improvement plan? If it's not written in there, where is there, where is it in their budget? It's not in there. It, it doesn't exist. It's just they check the box to say they're doing this, but they're not the, the, the, the organization is not being held accountable for what they say is in their goals. Cuz they wrote 'em in their goals. They, they, they, they've got it language in their goals, but then how do you begin to hold them accountable to say they are? And so I was so, I was like, yes, Jessica, because if it's not in the budget, if they're not intentional, if they're not moving equity and inclusion and diversity forward in these institutionalized policy practice and procedures, then it, it really, you know, it doesn't exist.You know, it is that thing that's out there in la la land. So when you file, how do we begin to, to look at that, the training? Where is the training? Because you gotta shift the mindset. You've gotta begin to transform how people are going to step into this work of equity and inclusion. And you gotta give them tools. You gotta be able to say, look, you need training. What is cultural competency training? What is the gear training? What are these trainings that are available? Where is the training from the People's Institute? Where is the training for? Because actually, if you look in our history, we've got a lot of history that have the Freedom schools and all of them, they were doing this work back in the day, but there was a shift back in the day where they stopped when they started killing off the leaders and started, you know, manipulating city governments and working in legislation and all of these things.You know, we, there was a halt during that period, period when they were doing all the civil rights and trying, you'd think of it, all those leaders that they, they really assassinated that was moving race equity and, and inclusion forward. You know, our presidents, our our black leaders, all of those leaders that they were taking out, you know, look at that history, look at what was being done in legislature, what was being done, set in place. So we have to look at the systems that continue to hold these inequities in place so that we can't move forward. And then there was a point in time, you know, during, um, this last couple of years that just really highlighted all the inequities, all the disparities, all of the, the racist, you know, uh, uh, practices and policies that was in place that really hindered us. And we said we needed to look at these things.Um, you know, with the killing of George Floyd and the murders that was going on with the pandemic, the pandemic really set it off because we could see if it was actual, we could see how disconnected and how, how all of these disparities were, were being, you know, manifest showing. They would just, they were just in your face. How you gonna not address stuff that's in your face and then all of the racial, you know, um, one of the things that we started when I think it was even before Pandemic, before George Floyd was all of the, um, things that was being manifested during the, the, uh, during the presidency of, of our wonderful President , we won't say his name, we won't say his name, you know, and that's the thing. We won't say his name, but we know who, who, who that was, that perpetuated a lot of racial tension in our nation and begin to cultivate it, to begin to really nurture all of that unhealthy, you know, behavior and mindset.And, and, and when, when we look at the history and we understand that racism has always been a crisis in our nation. And if we just looked at it and looked at the concerns of racial diverse communities and understand that it, it hasn't, it, it has never been a healthy, uh, history, but when we tuck it away and sweep it under the ground as if it doesn't exist, we do ourself a harm. And then when we look at how education plays a role, when we look at how health plays a role, you know, health and education are interdisciplinaries, and if we not looking at how all of these systems are connected that continue to perpetuate all of these internalized structures that perpetuate these disparities, then I think we're not doing, uh, a good job at being able to undo the institutionalized pieces of, of racism and how we we begin to, to break down those barriers and begin to level the playing field and begin to get services, you know, and begin to get opportunities and the financing.You know, um, racism has played a key in poverty. It's play a key role in health disparities. It's played a key role in education. If you guys think about it, you know, back in the day when they were building all these institutions, you know, um, we weren't a la even allowed to read or write in the sixties when they wanted, you know, when they were talking all about let's integrate these schools and everything, oh, you know, look at the racial tension there was just from us to be able to go to school with one another. And that's not been that long. That's been in our lifetime, it hasn't been hundreds of years ago. Oh, little Rock nine and all of that unrest and all that has not civil rights and all that. That's, that's not been long at all. We've not come that far. And there was a halt to all of that work on undoing all of those institution life pieces. And, and when, and I can say it, when, when those assassinations begin to happen, there was a shift where everybody was pulling back from trying to do that work, but yet it didn't go away. It still needs to be done. So as we move forward, we talk about how do we, how do we begin to look at models and, and the work, the foundation of that work that was laid prior to us, even now, if you go back in, in the sixties, you'll see boy, they had it going on.Those models, those sit-ins and all those things that they were doing to change policy, to change institutional practices. You know, there's no need for us to reinvent the wheel. We've just gotta begin to, to pick up the work and, and start doing the work again. There was a definite fear that came, uh, into our communities and our nations when they begin to kill our leaders for standing for what was right. The murders of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, and all of them, you know, you look back at that time, the, those ones that, even the Black Panthers, they exterminated those young people and they, and, and they put 'em in jail.There was two options. You, they were either exterminated or they were incarcerated, but they were definitely gonna dismantle those disruptors that was calling for equity. So, yeah. And, and when you have all kinds of hate mail and hate literature that's being flooded across our nation. Um, and I could tell you, um, back in 2018 when, when we started the Race equity Network, it was because there was hate literature being flooded across Kitsap County. Our churches was being people who are being attacked, racially slurred, and all kinds of things happening in the community. That community members went to our city council and said, what y'all gonna do about this stuff? Y'all see it's all coming up. You mean the government? Y'all gonna do nothing. Not gonna say nothing. What's up? So they decided they were going to, to at least have a race equity advisory council to the city council members that would deal with all these disparities and all these racial incidents that was popping off.But then, you know, they get in there and they wanna be political and tie their hands and say what they can and can't do, and don't even wanna take the training. I mean, by now, that was 2018, here we are going into 2023, our pobo still ain't got one South kit still ain't got one. We still don't got our commission on troop and reconciling. We, it's, it's still being pushed back. The pushback on moving equity, race equity forward, it's still, that's live and well. And for us to understand what we really are up against, you have to transform minds. And one of the things with, you know, with the education system banning books and all of these things, I said, what is that all about? You better know what that's all about. You have to have a greater understanding. Because my, my thinking is, if we don't even wanna be truthful about our history and teach true history and teach our young people in the schools, I said, that's dangerous ground. We're walk, walking on.But that's something that needs to be looked at very carefully because it starts in the educational system. If you're not even gonna teach to it, if you are not even going to give our young people true information, you know, when you're talking about, oh, these books can't be read, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. A red flag should be going up for all of us in our communities and all of us in the nation. What is that? Yeah, you better find out what's the, at the root of all of that. So we do have a lot of work to do. Did this, this, I mean, the work is plenties, the laborers are few.And then how do we that are doing the work, how do we come together and work in a collective collaborative way that can help us move these things forward in, in, uh, a healthy way? Many hands make light work. Many of us, you know, yes. My my area of of concentration might be education. Mine might be health, mine might be city government. Mine might be the, the faith community. Mine might be just community members. But what happens when we begin to cultivate unified work to address these issues across those barriers? Because we all have the same goal, but look at how we work in silos. What can we do to break down barriers and really build community between the community of those that are doing the work?You know, do we lay aside our own agendas? Just like Jessica was saying, we just wanna go to li How do we come alongside and support? How do we come alongside and just listen? How do we come in and hear what the community needs are and all of those things. But sometime we gotta set our own egos aside for the greater work because the work is bigger than we are. You know, it took back in the day, when I think about all of those civil rights leaders and, and it, and, and believe you me, the environment was more hostile to make that change back then. You know, you, you had people gunning, people holding people. Come on now the history's there, but yet we wanna erase some of that history and to say, no, this is the only part we wanna teach of that, that history. You know, we talk about our, our native, uh, and our indigenous communities that was here. And understand, and I'll keep saying it, as long as I have breath in my body, I come from a stolen people brought to a stolen land where they exterminated the indigenous tribes that was here to be able to capitalize on their land and everything else. And that history, you know, it's like, oh, we don't wanna talk about that.But when you don't address the atrocities that have happened, it will keep coming up because you never went back and never healed that land. You never healed all of that, uh, trauma and all those things. You know, one of the things that I always look at, I do look at, I do look at what happened over in Germany. That entire nation had to deal with the atrocities that Hitler committed. And it wasn't until they had to deal with their own atrocities that healing began to, to, to move those communities forward in a way where they could, you'll never be able to erase what happened. But they have to be able to heal those family, heal, move towards healing, move towards reconciling those things. But when you just step over all the atrocities you've committed and, and, and say, oh, oh, they ain't this and that ain't that. That is a shipwreck. That's a a, that's a recipe for destruction.And so how do we begin to do the work of healing? Because the health district, and I say this to Jessica and to the health district, y'all are supposed to be in the healing business. I mean, that's what you say. And then I say to the education people, y'all supposed to be in education. What are y'all doing? Health, health and education for some and not for all. And justice. Justice for who? Justice for some are justice for whom. See, we got to get, we, we have to understand that we have to begin to shift the mindsets of those that can't see these things.You know, we have to begin to say, how do we take the scales off of people's eyes so they can see clearly that these are things that we, we definitely have to, to work towards? How do we unstop the ears so that they can hear the voices and hear, um, the things that need to be heard? Because some people, you know, some, and I can say this cause one of my young people said to me, she said, you know, what do you do with people that just wanna fight? They don't, they, they're not trying to heal. They're not trying to, they just wanna fight.I said, so how do you become peacemakers in the fight? How do you, how do we step into that role that we can at least be able to, to speak words that can, um, prick hearts and minds and transform, uh, the communities that we're serving? Because we're all serving, we're all serving our communities in a way, you know? And I, you know, it, it, it's hard when you always gotta walk through dodoo. I don't know. You know, I'm just throwing it out there like that. You know, when you gotta crawl through feces every day, that's, you know, those that are in plumbing and stuff like that. I don't know how they do it, but is it needed? Definitely.So we, we do, we, we, we can look at that. We can do some collective visioning that can help our communities to move forward in a way that can really meet the needs. You know, because I, I always have said our county isn't so large that we can address this issue and that we can do this work and we can do this work. Well, we're not a King County, we're not a Pierce County. We're a Kitsap County. And collectively, we should be able to move things forward in a healthier way. That guess what could be a model, not just for our state, but for the nation. Uh, you know, a little Kitsap County has changed the way that they address inequities. The way that they, with racism, the way that they deal with disparities, the way that they deal with all of these unhealthy things that continue to hinder us all. I don't care what color you are. Hate comes in all colors. Mm-hmm. , white, black, yellow, green, whatever way. But if we can deal with some of those issues, the bitterness and those roots of bitterness, why are our communities so bitter? What's going on that we can't come together and talk about it? If you are mad, I'm, I'm cool with you being mad, but can we talk about it? Can, can we reason together in the multitude of council, there can be some safety. If we come in, in a collective way and deal with it, there can be some safety in that.Danielle (00:54:27):The, uh, I was just, and I see your hand, Jessica, I, I was like thinking so much. And Maria, I know you were there with me of our meeting last week with these families that, you know, they came out almost 50 families, you know, 50 people show up to a meeting Thanksgiving week.Maria (00:54:47):And, and I thought, there's so much hope. And just showing up and, and in the showing up, you know, the meeting was advertised. I saw some for like six 15, some for six 30. I got there at six because my phone rang and someone said, Hey, where are you? I said, well, I'm not there yet. They said, well, hurry up. We're here,Oh, it's like six o'clock. So I pulled up, you know, and I got there and the principal was opening the door. And I had emailed early in the day and I said, well, you know, I don't know who's gonna show up because this thing went out over Instagram. It went out, you know, word of mouth.Danielle (00:55:29):And when people got there, y you know, they, the setup was to share stories and then to work towards solutions. But you could see when the invitation was to work towards solutions, people just stayed quiet. Cuz they were like, no, we have more stories to share. And, and let me tell you, we we had to cut it off at like eight 15. Eight. Yeah. Because people were not done and not everybody got a chance to share there. But I think about those families ended, and Maria, you can speak to this too, like, they were like, when is the next meeting? And we had, you know, one of the main leaders from the Latina community was, was speaking and saying like, Hey, like we have problem, you know, we've had problems with the African American community and we, where are they? Like, we know they're suffering.Like, she didn't say it like that, but basically like, we are not the only people of color here that are experiencing this. So, um, that gave me a lot of hope. The ability to show up and the stories they shared, I think are compounded, like what you say, the history, when you name the history, I'm like, oh crap, we're repeating all of this right now in live time. Like, it's happened yesterday. It happened, probably happened today, probably happened tomorrow. Like, we actually haven't, like slowed it down. It doesn't feel like, but Maria, Jessica, like, feel free to jump in. That's kind of where I was at.Jessica (00:56:59):So Danielle, I guess I wanted to jump in. I guess a couple things, especially, you know, after hearing, you know, Aku talk, you know, one of the things I think government should be doing is, you know, addressing, you know, inequities head on. And, um, some of you might follow, uh, the health district on, on social media. But, um, two weeks ago, um, the health district did a Facebook post recognizing transgender Awareness week. Now, this is the first time the health district has ever done a post like that. And you wouldn't believe, well, actually you would believe the amount of hate that we got. But I have to tell you though, before we declared racism a public health crisis and really got deep into this work, I don't know if we would've ever done a post like that. Um, but you know, it was a conversation between the equity program and our communications program.Our, our communications folks were all on board. They even bumped this, this idea for this post up to our administrator who was supportive of it. He goes, Hey, just make sure that you include our mission statement that, you know, our job is to promote the health of all people in Kitsap County. And, and I was really proud of the agency because I, you know, as government, sometimes we have to be careful about how we speak and sometimes it's hard to be the first. But to be honest, I didn't see any other governmental entity. And you all can check, please check me on this. But I didn't see any other governmental entity make that comment, you know, make that statement that we support our lgbtq plus and our transgender neighbors, loved ones, community members. Um, and so this was a small thing, but this is where, you know, um, you know, there, there are these huge changes that we need to make as a culture, right?And, and, and government structures. But even if it's just the acknowledgement of the suffering of people and the fact that we are, we see them, we honor them, and we're there with them is huge. Um, and, and, you know, and I give kudos to, to, to to you Danielle and, and Aku. Cause I know y'all have been having these community conversations. So having, giving people a space to share their truth and their experiences is huge. And when you can bring government officials there to hear it, because often, and, and I, and I'm speaking broadly, I mean, I I I've been in government for almost 15 years, so I, not an expert, but I've been in it long enough. You know, we tend to like the quantitative data, right? The numbers. And I think as an public health in general, there's been this big movement about, and I'm gonna use my my nerd term, but disaggregating data.So looking at the numbers, but saying, oh, well, let's see, can we break this down? What is our Asian community experiencing? Or Pacific Islander? And that gives some depth to it. But then also realizing that there are sub-communities within this community. And, you know, um, Maria and I were talking about, um, VN Voices of the Pacific Island network. They had an event earlier this year, and they had some data that showed that not all Pacific Islanders have the same educational experiences and this educational outcomes. So on, on the one hand, you know, government, we love numbers. Well, we need to dig deeper into those numbers, right? Break things down and really figure out what our community's experiencing. And sometimes in public health, we're like, oh, if the community's too small, then the analysis might not be enough. Who cares? Just still bring that data up.And that's where you compliment it with the stories, right? The qualitative data. And this is something where I think when you think of governments as white supremacists, right? You know, there's this need for productivity. And you have to, for every media you go to, you have to show what specific outcomes you have. Well, that's also something I'm hoping to change slowly at the, at the agency too. But, um, but also with data and, and the, the importance of storytelling and catching these stories and elevating them. And one of the things that, um, and you know, Kang Marie can talk about this. When we had our first health equity collaborative meeting, I got a question by a community member who was skeptical, right? Because their experience was when they've worked with government, they have gotten roadblock after roadblock after roadblock. And having to be honest and be like, look, here's what I can do as a manager of a program of two people.But at that meeting, we had a, the health officer there, and he is one of our highest officials at the health district. He's like our Spock, um, if you're a Star Trek nerd, but, um, which Memorial Star Wars. But, um, you know, our chief science officer was there. My supervisor who was a director was there. So, I mean, one thing I'm also hoping with, with these collaborative meetings, if, if they're meeting community meetings, also just throw that out there where you think having the health district be present is important and you want somebody with a director or administrator in their title. That's also something that, um, you know, I can also, I can also help facilitate. But something also, Danielle or maybe actually, um, Kayleigh, to your point, you know, we talk about this work, but how do we support each other? So we support each other in terms of, um, you know, bring cross-disciplinary, but then also really elevating the fact that we need that self-care and that connection and the fact that this is such heavy work.Um, you know, Maria and I have mentioned, we, we, we've helped with some of these, uh, focus groups for the kids at community resources. The stories are, are just heartbreaking. Um, and whether it's our youth and how they experience bullying, our elders who are experiencing lack of care, you know, lack of resources, and they just need some additional help. And you don't have that necessarily multi-generational household like you did before. So they don't have the supports that they had in the past. There's so much going on. But I think also all of us doing this kind of work, taking care of each other as well, and then also letting people know it's, it's okay to not be okay. Um, so anyway, I just, I just wanted to throw that out there too.Maria (01:02:33):So I've been pondering Akuyea, uh, question towards the end and she said, how do we do this work? How do we, um, collaborate and, um, bring about solutions? And something that, uh, Jessica mentioned fairly early on when she spoke, she said, the importance of letting go of ego, right? Leaving our ego at the door and, uh, working collaborative with one each other o one another as we do this work. And then the second thing is listening. And that's the one thing I've really learned as, um, uh, community engagement specialists, uh, working with Jessica, is that when I bring concerns to her or other community members, bring concerns to her, she listens, and then she acts, she does, whether it's something that, it's a long-term thing that will take a while to address or something that we can address quickly. Uh, she keeps this wonderful worksheets and she keeps track of where she's at on different projects. And so I think being able to be transparent, because since she shares that information, she shared some of that information at the health equity, um, collaborative meeting that we had. Um, I think that's how we build trust with our community members, that when they come, uh, to our organization, that we will not just listen, but we will act now. It might not be immediate, but we will be taken action. Um, and so, um, that's something that I've learned just in my one month at the public health district with Jessica.Jump in. Thank you, Jessica. Thank you for that. One of the things that, you know, I was talking with one of my, um, equity sisters, Carrie Augusta, and as we were reading through the newspaper and stuff, you know, she said, you know, we need to be looking at patterns of oppression. Are we doing that in a collective way? Just looking at the patterns, those patterns keep manifesting. It doesn't matter if it's manifesting with the African American community, the Hispanic community, the Pacific Islander community, whatever community is, are we looking, are we looking at those patterns of oppression? That's key for us to move forward as we do the work. Because in order for us to address, uh, and undo some of these things, we gotta identify 'em. We've gotta take time to sit down and identify these patterns that keep, you know, go. You know, that just like when we were, were dealing with, you know, with, uh, the racism on Bainbridge Island, you know, uh, it manifests itself back in the nineties and then again in the two early 2000. But I said, look at the, they go on ground for a little while and then they come back out.But look at the patterns of how they begin to, to do that work, uh, of, of, um, you know, racism. Look at the pattern of it. Look at how it shows up. Look at how it, it manifests itself in our institutions, in our workplaces, you know, in those areas that we are in on a daily basis. Don't matter in the schools. Look, they've been dealing with racism in the schools forever. Ever since Little Rock nine, they've been dealing with racism in the schools. And that was because why? Because racism was alive and well, and LA racism is still alive and well. So how do we begin to move these things and begin to address these things in a way that's gonna shift the policy and procedures? It should not be allowed in the institutional, shouldn't be allowed in the schools, shouldn't be allowed in our city governments, if you're serving all of us, if you are serving every one of those students, why are we dealing with what's happening at North Kitsap School District? And, and there's some questions I think that we need to be asking to administration and to those superintendents and to those staff members, because they're the ones that hold those practices in place, whether they're just or unjust. Who are the gatekeepers?Yeah. You gotta see who's gatekeeping and who's gatekeeping what, and, and really doing the, that type of visioning to be able to address these disparities or, or address the racism or address all of these inequities. Because if you got a principal that's gate keeping it, why do you think it keeps coming up?Danielle (01:08:20):Because it's us who hold these things in, in place. Human beings hold these practices in place. None of us get away. All of us are accountable. Mm-hmm. , it's, it's not just, that's when that one, that one, no, it's us. It's all of us who hold these practices and these policies in place. It's whether you will or whether you won't.So tho those are the things I think when we can get down to those foundational principles on how to address, and really, are we asking the right questions? Because they'll have us running off on a, a wild goose chase on something that, that , I'm just saying that don't even that, that is totally gonna miss the mark. You know, because if we, if we just keep pruning this thing, pruning it, pruning it, and never getting down to the root of it, we ain't plucking up nothing. We, we, we, all we doing is making it flourish and thrive. Because why do we prune? We prune things so it can come back healthier and stronger. I'm just, I'm just using these parables so we can see what we doing. Are we just pruning this thing? Are we getting to the root of it so we can pluck it up? Because if we're not, I think we're missing, we need to go back and revision and revisit and re-question and ask those. What's the, because you all know what's the root causeWhat's the root cause to the disparities that's happening, Jessica, in your departments or at the health district? What's the root cause when you are up in these schools and these things keep on, um, coming up and manifesting? What's the root causeDanielle (01:10:43):Go back. Do, do that questioning, just ponder. Just look at it. But let's, let's get our chart out. Let's see what's happening, and then, then we can have a real good conversation about next steps and how we can move forward and what we gonna do.Danielle (01:11:07):Kaylee, I saw your hand raised. Um, and, and I just wanted to say, like briefly after that meeting, I had a post up on Instagram, uh, highlighting the article, and I had over 400 likes, but 300 of them were from local students. And I had over a hundred private messages to me, and I screenshot them. And, and it wasn't just Latino students, it was black students, it was white students, it was, you know, L G B T Q community. Like they're ba I, what I understood from that is like, come on, get to work. Like, and I've, I've sent the screenshots, you know, to Maria and a few to Kali and some toku, you know, um, because they're important. The messages they give were important. Um, but yeah. Kaylee, jump in.Kalie (01:12:00):Yeah, I just, I mean, I love the questions that are being asked and Aku, some of your metaphors are like so amazingly helpful. Um, the pruning, uh, like I, yes, like I, I think that that is part of it is not getting to the root. And I think one of the things that Danielle and I have been trying to work on in our groups is also what you mentioned Maria, is like, we have to be able to listen to each other. And I think like from a mental health standpoint and the impact of racism, like there is so much shame, so people cannot listen. I mean, especially speaking from a white person, my own racism, having to work through that and, and then when I, like me as a white person in these conversations, right? So many people cannot hear like, we're never getting down to that.And like that is part of what I think we're trying to address in those small group settings is like, how to teach people to dig down deep and actually, like, what is happening in your body in these conversations. And I think, like, I feel like this like top like both and like the accountability you're talking about a kue, like, has to be, because some people will never, ever be able to get to what is deep down and actually deal with it. And if there isn't accountability, I don't, we're not, we're not gonna cut any of that rot out . But I think like, yeah, like trying to continue to figure out how to get down to that root and deal with people's shame and the fear that like racism has taught you so that you can actually listen so that we can actually collaborate. Um, and I mean, I obviously am speaking to my white, uh, community members that it's like, that is our work as white people that we have to work down to, like what prevents us from listening and hearing and changing and holding other white people accountable. Um, so that's where that was taking me.Jessica (01:14:07):So Kue, you asked about, you know, the root cause of inequities. And I don't necessarily have the answer, but I wanna to share. Um, I, I've seen a growing conversation, um, kinda in public health circles about power as a social determinant of health. So when public health people use the term social determinants of health, they're looking at what social factors affect health. Um, there are different models out there, but most public health experts agree that more affects health besides what you eat and how much you exercise. It's the social and cultural factors. It's, it's, it's, um, the economy, it's your built environment like, you know, access to sidewalks, parks and things like that, racism, discrimination, so many things impact health. And what i, I appreciate about power as a factor in health is because that's where you see governments needing to stop holding onto power so much, right?And so there are some, um, agencies that are starting to dismantle that a bit. So I, I wanna elevate, for example, um, our, our colleagues in, so our public health colleagues in Tacoma Pierce County. So they have a budgeting process where they allow the community to help them set budget priorities. We're not there yet as a health district, I hope someday to actually advocate for that as well. But it's looking at how do we share power with our community and how do we also foster community building as well? So like, in, and, and you know, you'll probably know the Square than I do, but just as, as, as an observer, I've noticed like an increase in the number of nonprofits and people wanting to do really amazing work. Um, you know, um, helping other people. But there's that lack of capacity. Oh, you know, people might start nonprofit, but they might not have all the training that they need.Um, so as, as a community looking at power and how do we shift that and doing a power analysis, and I, I think you've talked to me about this, you know, really looking at who holds power in Kitsap County and how do we work together to, to to share that power. Um, so, so there, there, there's that piece. But then also, um, you know, Kuya talked about training, right? And so for me, a lo

WE BUILD POWERFUL HUMANS www.elevatestrengthco.com@bethaneerandles@elevatestrengthcoMeet the Team HERE. (https://www.elevatestrengthco.com/our-team ) Welcome to Elevate Strength and Conditioning, Home of Bainbridge Island's Most Inclusive Fitness CommunityHOME OF BAINBRIDGE ISLAND'S MOST INCLUSIVE FITNESS COMMUNITYACCOUNTABILITY: Every member is important to our coaching staff. Each person will have a full accountability partner in every staff member, paired with a community that will support you every step of the way.Elevate is not just a gym where you pay a membership, Elevate is a family. Your goals are our priority. COMMITMENTWE CARE ABOUT YOUR GOALS.We are committed to helping you become your strongest, most confident self.Every session spent working with our highly skilled staff will help you, “become the machine,” and prepare you to move through life with ease and confidence in your movement. Our mission is to help you actualize yours, one step and one drop of sweat at a time, at a pace that works for you.GRITWe are going to do hard things. We are going to struggle. We are going to fail. We are going to succeed. We will do all of these things together. Strength is the key piece of everyone's individual independence in movement, and together, we will overcome obstacles to become stronger, more capable humans.INTEGRITYWe are honest in our assessments and programming to meet each person where they are so we can take them where they want to be. We believe in our method and our programming and its ability to help every single member progress responsibly and with quality movement. Transcripts:Danielle (00:38):Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and healing. Uh, so proud to welcome my dear friend, uh, Bethany Randall's, owner of Elevate Strength and Conditioning on Banbridge Island, Washington. And this girl, this friend of mine, really knows and cares for human beings. And so here we go. Um, that I'm recording. Okay. Got it. Well, hey, Bethany, uh, welcome to recording a podcast with me. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, so it feels really special and important, and in fact, I just saw you today, so that was fun. Yeah. I brought my whole, well, three of my kids with me, so that was kind of a surprise for you and also for me, . Yeah, no, Bethany, I wanted to just, people may be like, well, how did Danielle and Bethany know each other? And I would say, it's been like a decade, right? Bethanee (01:39):Yeah. Yeah. It's been, let's see, yeah, it's been at least nine years since I've met you, right? Nine years. Yeah. And for anybody watching this, just just know that my two, uh, French bulldogs are in the room, so if you hear any funny noises, it's just them. And, sorry, . Um, Danielle (02:00):That's great. Um, yeah. So I met you at the Y M C A and I came to one, I think I came to your ripped class first and then started working out, and that was when it was like in a smaller room, but eventually it grew to like the gymnasium to where you had people lined up. Bethanee (02:19):Yeah. Yeah. So when I met you, sorry, the dog's cracking me up. Um, when I met you, I was working at the Y and I might have still been a volunteer at the Y I'm not sure if I was an actual employee there, but, um, I started teaching some group fitness classes there, uh, kickboxing, cycling ripped, which was a, like a high intensity interval class. Um, and when I started, I was being trained by two other instructors, and eventually I was able to go off and have my own classes. Um, and then they kind of grew into really big classes. And that was kind of the start of my, um, career and teaching fitness to others. So, but I, I, you and Louis would come to those classes, which was great. Danielle (03:06):That's true. And I remember he filled out like a comment card once, , do you remember that comment card? Bethanee (03:12):Yeah. I still have that comment card. . Yeah.Danielle (03:16):Yeah. Um, yeah. Well, then I started doing some personal training with you there, and you actually introduced me to some movements that weren't a part of the classes. I think it was like deadlift and cleans, um, and just a lot of laps around the upper track, like bear crawl laps sometimes. I remember those. So just a lot of, um, fitness. But the one thing I remember about you from the very beginning, and that still stands out every time I see you, is that you, the way you relate to people and the way you show up is consistent and kind and inviting. And that, not that I don't love to work out. I do. I do it on my own too when I can. Um, but I, I did just enjoy showing up to get to hang with you and experience being with you. So, um, yeah. Bethanee (04:09):Yeah, yeah. So you're talking about, you know, just the time you spent kind of around me, I guess we got to spend more time with each other, whether it was in the private training or in the classes. And, um, we developed a friendship mm-hmm. over the years. Uh, yeah, go ahead and like, refresh me a little bit on, yeah. Danielle (04:29):So then tell me about your journey from the why forward, and I'd love to hear like how you made it. One thing we're just checking in with business owners and people, therapists, whoever we're in, whoever I'm interviewing is like, how did you make it through c what is your business doing? And like, where are you headed? So those are a lot of questions, but yeah, just catching up. Bethanee (04:50):Yeah. So, um, I moved to Bainbridge Island in 2015 to manage another gym, and I was still working for the Y M C A at the time, and I continued to work for the Y M C A for another year and a half, uh, after I moved. So I was commuting from Bainbridge to Silverdale, uh, multiple times a day. putting like 400 miles on my car, um, every week. Um, but eventually I left the Y M C A in 2016 to be in Bainbridge full time. And I took over, um, as an operations manager for a local gym out here. And it was a CrossFit gym. Um, and I came on as a personal trainer, and I came on as somebody that would be the basic, like on-ramp coordinator. There was no, um, program for new members or people coming into the gym to like safely assimilate into the regular gym communi. So, um, before I was hired, the gym saw a lot of turnover. Uh, its membership numbers were pretty low, and my job was to kind of turn that around. So within, I think it was within the first two years, uh, we doubled the membership size. Uh, we started to double the, uh, revenue, and we grew a personal training clientele in addition to group fitness clientele. Um, so that gym kind of became my home base, and I found, you know, lots of great friends and family, um, chosen family there. And some of my favorite people, like Danielle came with me, um, made the, the drive out to Bainbridge multiple times a week to work out. And in 2017, I became co-owner of that gym. Okay. And I was minority owner. I was not, um, like a big player in terms of partnership, uh, but it allowed me to kind of take on a little bit more in terms of what my role was. And at the end of 2019, um, the decision was made to take me off of the ownership. Okay. Um, which in retrospect was actually a really good decision. Okay. So, uh, the, the majority owner wanted to keep kind of control of the business and wanted to do it, um, so low. So I kinda stepped back a little bit. Um, then Covid happened. We moved the gym right before Covid happened to a new home, and that was really rough. We actually had a more than 50% turnover Oh, geez. When that happened. So, um, we had a very small membership, and then the shutdown came along shortly after Covid kind of became a mainstream thing. And so we immediately pivoted to an online type of format. We rented out all of our gym equipment, and I started putting on, uh, two days a week, or two days a week, two times a day, um, five days a week, live workouts for people. Whoa. So people could, they could tune in from their phone or their computer or, um, we actually linked it through YouTube as well. And, um, the gym owner at the time, he was streaming the content and I was delivering the workout, so I was writing the programming. Um, but we made this accessible for everybody by making it free. And our members continued to support us by, you know, keeping their membership active. Um, and we supported them by the videos and letting them borrow equipment. So, um, that went on for a few months, and then in May of 2020, um, it was time for me to step away from that business and go on my own because the owner was going to close the business down. So I did, and I kept doing the live videos. So twice a day, five days a week, um, up until actually over a year after that timeframe. But, um, in July of 2020, I was able to finally, uh, open my own gym business. And, um, I was working at a deal with the owner of the former gym to basically buy the assets of his company. So the membership, the equipment, um, the social media rights. So I didn't actually wanna buy the, the business itself. I wanted to kinda start fresh on my own. So, um, I was able to do that. It's a very, very long story that I don't know if you wanna spend time on, but, um, a lot of hard work on my part and a lot of support from my community, um, made that possible. So, so yeah. So in July of 2020, um, I decided to open my own business entity, and I didn't have a home for the gym. Um, I was basically training people in parks, in people's driveways, uh, school basketball courts, um, outdoor baseball fields, soccer fields, like anywhere I could find space, I would host classes, I would take private clients. Um, and I hauled equipment everywhere. I have like a little suv, it's like a mini suv. And it was full all the time of like, you know, thousand pounds of dumbbells medicine balls and kettle bells. Um, I even got three rowing machines in there a couple times to take them to the park, and, uh, yeah, rain or shine. Um, the community, like, they followed me. They came with me, and I held classes at 6:00 AM eight 30, noon, five 15, um, every day throughout the week for about six months outside. So, so that, that started in May or July, well, we couldn't see people until June. So when they shut down the state for fitness and in person, like wellness, activities, restaurants, all of it, they shut it down mid-March, and we couldn't do anything until June 2nd. Okay. I'll never forget the date because it was, you know, I was waiting for that date. Um, so as of June 2nd, 2020, I was able to meet people. Um, there was that little bit of time there between May and July when I officially opened where I wasn't technically, um, an employee of the former business, but I was still running the classes. I was still doing the live streams. Um, and my hope with that was that people would stay with me through the transition. Um, I also couldn't talk about a lot of it while it was going on, because it was in transition, uh, and I didn't wanna freak anybody out, if that makes sense. So my hope was to continue to foster a feeling of like, okay, this is our normal workout group, this is our normal time, this is our normal instructor. We're gonna keep that going. Mm-hmm. . And then behind the scenes I'm working with, you know, people to get the, the business deal done. So, um, hang on one second. Sure. You're okay, . Um, so yeah. So then in July I announced, um, that I was opening Elevate. Um, I didn't solicit anybody. Um, it was understood with the, with the buying the assets from the former business that we were going to just transfer everything over. Um, so the former owner was kind enough to do that for me. Um, and I solidified my deal of buying the former gym assets, uh, on September 3rd, 2020. So at that point, um, I still hadn't signed a lease. I still didn't have a space. I was still training people outside. I was still doing, you know, two times a day live videos on Facebook or YouTube. Um, and four days later, I signed my first commercial lease. Um, I found a space on Bainbridge, 4,000 square feet, uh, within my price range. And the location of the gym is, it's kind of North island, so it's kinda away from the ferry. It's closer to the bridge. So when you're driving onto Ba Bridge Island, it's about two minutes past the bridge. And so, um, a lot of people had feedback from me and they said, you know, that's too far for a lot of people to go. And I just said, you know, if people are willing to follow me to a park, to a school, to somebody's random driveway, to somebody's random property in the middle of the woods to do a workout, like, they'll come to this location. And, and so, um, I signed my lease, I put my deposit down. And so yeah, that week I had my, my business deal done. I had my lease, and luckily I had a really great landlord who was willing to work with me and, um, make it so that I could afford to be there. So, um, my gym community helped me remodel the space. Uh, they donated money for the floor. They donated money for, uh, repairs that we needed. The building I moved into, needed a lot of work to be a functional gym space. And, um, on October 10th, so a little over a month later, we opened our doors. Wow. That is So, yeah. And it was just in time for like, the rain and the cold. So our workout hours were starting to get kind of cold, you know, 6:00 AM class was in the dark. Um, but overall, like, you know, it was perfect timing. And with Covid, sorry, there's lots of seagulls outside right now. Um, with Covid, there were a lot of restrictions around opening a business, and I had been really enjoying being outside because we had less restrictions outside. Like, everybody felt a little more comfortable. We didn't have to wear masks. Like we could space out, you know, 50 feet away from each other if we wanted to. Um, moving everybody inside was a challenge. I would say at least 30% of my membership didn't wanna be inside. And even with that, we could only run classes of five people at a time, because state regulations said five people at a time. So we made these squares, like, I think it was like seven by seven squares. You'd come into the gym, you'd go to your square, you'd get your equipment, you'd stay in your square, keep your mask on. Um, it was hard, you know, and trying to basically tell people, like, you know, your workout will still be fun while you're wearing a mask. Uh, a lot, a lot of people got it. And a lot of people did not like it. You know, it was different. It was uncomfortable and sweaty. Um, but for me it was like, you know, this is a really small price to pay to do the thing that you really wanna do. So if, like, you have to make this little tiny sacrifice for an hour to get your fitness on, like, so, um, I'm happy to say we didn't have a lot of turnover, you know, because of that. Yeah. Um, there, there were a couple people that had strong feelings, and I, I very, you know, happily said goodbye to them mm-hmm. because the, the health and the safety of my community is like the most important thing to me. So, um, yeah, I wanted to make sure that I did everything I could to keep people safe. Yeah, so we opened on October 10th, and then on November, I wanna say it was November 15th. So a little over a month after that, they shut down indoor fitness again in Washington State . So we had like a nice little month in our new space. And so, um, I reached out to the community and I was like, look, we have all this space outside. I need some popup tents. And the community came forward. I got seven popup tents. I put 'em up right outside the gym. I strung some Christmas lights, um, through them. I moved all the equipment up next to the big doors. So it was just accessible. And we ran classes outside from mid-November until February 1st. So we were out there Christmas Eve, we were out there in New Year's Eve, we were out there in the snow. Um, some days we had, I mean, we had to wear masks, I think up until like January. Like there was, there were a lot of rules. And I'm just really grateful that people were there to, to work out. And, you know, they were uncomfortable and they were cold. And, um, I figured if we could make it through that park, like basketball courts, like snow outside, inside, like I figured whoever was still there would probably stay. So Danielle (16:32):I think what you haven't said, I think what you're saying, and also didn't say very clear, like it's very clear, but it's not like in a clear sentence, is Bethany, people love the community that comes around you and the, the vibe and the community you create. And I think it's just evident, you know, first I know it for firsthand from my relationship, but even to hear the story again, I'm just so impacted at there's more there than just like, Hey, I wanna show up and lift a dumbbell. Bethanee (17:05):Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Yeah. You know, the, the, the gym community during Covid, I think we all really needed each other. You know, we needed, um, we needed a sanctuary, we needed an outlet. You know, there were people that were working from home who had never worked from home before. And all of a sudden, you know, your environment changes. And with that comes, you know, do you have kids that are also home? Do you have a spouse that's also home? Like, are you able to have, you know, you time, are you able to have self care time? Um, are you able to take out, you know, your stress from the pandemic in like a healthy way? Uh, elevate became a place, I mean, for all of us, for me too, um, where we were able to just, you know, work on ourselves or be with people that we loved, you know, outside of our families. Um, and with us shut down restrictions. Like, you know, we're not all hanging out with other people. So for some people, like this was their only social interaction mm-hmm. that they'd had, you know, all year And, you know, for me to, to be able to try to foster that environment for people, like that was everything for me. Like, it's great for me to see all of you. Like, I love that. I never take that for granted. I'm always happy when anybody walks through the doors. But to see people be able to, you know, develop relationships with other humans, you know, even if it's like in a, like we're workout buddies, you know? Um, I think during that time, especially during like strict quarantine, lockdown time, like coming outta that, like we needed interaction mm-hmm. and like the other, the other places you were gonna get it was gonna be like grocery store, gas station, Costco, you know, but there was no, you couldn't just go hang out with people Yeah. So anyway, it was kind of a safe haven. And we also got to work out, which was like a super bonus. So Danielle (19:02):One thing I always notice about coming into your gym too, I think that creates a community feel for me is that you have all of these different flags hanging in the gym, and you've supported, um, supported so many different causes that I think move towards community or inclusivity. And I just wonder you've made that a really important part of your community and how you do business. I just wonder if you'd speak to that a little bit. Bethanee (19:29):Yeah, yeah. So, um, I come from, you know, pre elevate days. I come from a background of doing general fitness in a, in a big setting, corporate setting, like the Y M C A, you know, or a Snap Fitness or a, or a Silver Fitness. Um, and then coming into the CrossFit world, elevate is not a CrossFit gym, but the gym I used to manage was coming into that world and seeing, you know, flags up in gyms that are representative of the, the armed services, you know, honoring people that serve their community in some capacity. Um, so when I open Elevate, I wanted it to be different. Obviously, I didn't want it to feel like a CrossFit gym because I was trying to get away from that. Um, and that's a whole other great story. Um, but there was more, there was more than that, right? So, not only do I wanna honor people who have served their country, so whether it's Army or Coast Guard, you know, um, air National Guard, Navy, space Force, um, somebody got us a Space Force flag. Uh, I wanted to make sure to touch on the other community members. Um, so like the l lgbtq community, the trans community, the non-binary community. Um, so we have flags that represent all types of people that are up in our gym. And, you know, when people walk in to elevate, I want them to, to see something that resonates with them. Like, I want them to see something that makes them feel like, oh, like, I belong here, or I'll be accepted here. Or there are people like me here. Mm-hmm. , um, yeah, without question. I think, you know, if, if you walk into Elevate, like you're gonna know right away what kind of person I am. Like, you're gonna know what kind of community we have. You're gonna see Black Lives Matter signs on the walls, like you're gonna see rainbows everywhere. And it's not just that, like, those things are great, but I also think that the people really make it special. So if like, you walk in, you don't know anybody, you just moved here, you, you've been in isolation for two years cuz of Covid. Like, I totally expect every single person in that room to say hi to you the first time you walk into that gym. And then every time after that mm-hmm. , you know, um, Danielle is really good at saying hi to everybody, everybody, you know, and, and making it special. Like, and it's never, how do I, it it's always genuine. Like, you, you genuinely mean it because you genuinely care about people and you're not the only person like that. And I'm so happy that there are more people like you, you know, welcoming, like caring, giving humans that are like, willing to give their energy or their space, you know, or a hug or just how are you, how are your kids? You know? Um, like I've, I don't want our gym to be a cold space. I want it to be a space where, you know, you walk in and you see a picture of somebody that you know on the wall doing something amazing, right? We have all these black and white photos of our community, um, doing hard things, doing workouts, like mm-hmm. it. Yeah. So, so I really want it to be, um, known like from the second you walk in that that space is special mm-hmm. and inclusive mm-hmm. . So, um, I think in terms of like providing, you know, um, equity for my members or accessibility for my members, um, I've never turned anybody away. And, you know, if people, like, we have people that range all over the board. Um, bay Bridge Island is a pretty affluent community, but not everybody that lives here is affluent. Right? We have lots of people that lived here that live here currently, including myself, who depend on affordable housing, who depend on help, who depend on, um, additional resources like to stay here. And whether it's they wanna stay here for a job or maybe they have a family member or kids or a school district, like, I think that no matter what your, like social status is, your economic status, like your demographically, you should be able to have access to health and wellness. And what we do falls into those categories mm-hmm. . And so, um, we have our general membership options, which is our standard, you know, this is what we charge per month, this is what we charge per a year, you know, if you wanna deal. Um, but we also have a scholarship fund so that we can really help people who aren't in need of financial assistance. Um, yeah. And, and you know, some people have offered to help, you know, they've reached out to me and they've said, Hey, like, is there a way I can sponsor somebody? Like, is there anybody that needs, um, financial assistance to be here? And the answer is yes. Like, there's probably always gonna be people in our community that need help. And so the, at the very least, what I can do on my end is have options ready for them. Mm-hmm. . So, um, the other side of that is like, you know, there are people that don't live here that wanna be a part of our community mm-hmm. . So how do we reach those people? Like maybe those people can pay for services, maybe they can't. So I keep, you know, over 350 videos, prerecorded videos of workouts on my Facebook, my business Facebook people can access at any time. So if they wanna do a strength workout, they can access that. If they wanna do a conditioning or cardio workout, core workout, if they wanna do mobility and stretching for an hour, all of that is up there and all of that is free. Mm-hmm. . So, you know, if I can hit all of those targets and, you know, if people wanna be a part of the community, like give them an option to be a part of the community and whatever that looks like for them. Danielle (25:00):I love that. I love that. And, and just, I wonder if you would speak to now more recently, and I think you had some other, like, kind of like growing programs. You had a hiking group, I saw, um, you've had some workshops that are, have either happened or are happening. Like how does that work at Elevate? And, and would you talk a little bit about about more like what you guys offer for that too? Bethanee (25:22):Yeah. Yeah. So, um, the Elevate staff is made up of 11, 12 people. 12 people including myself. Um, and all of our staff are different. They're all amazing. They all have their strengths. Um, none of us are the same. Mm-hmm. , you know, we all have different backgrounds in terms of how we, you know, came to this place, how we came to be trainers, um, our stories might be different and why we even want to help people through fitness mm-hmm. . And, you know, my goal as a, as a gym owner is to try to help my staff take their strengths and help them grow their strengths. Mm-hmm. , right? And then also help them, you know, if, if they need like, developmental work in other areas, like to help them, you know, get to where they wanna be. Um, but if they have a specialty, like let's hone in on it. Like let's shine some light on it and let's make it your thing. Like, if you're really good at it, like you should absolutely be doing it if that's something you want. So, um, yeah, we've had a couple programs and I've, this has kind of been this last like six months or so. Um, I feel like we're finally coming out of the Covid Haze. Yeah. So we're able to actually do some of these things. Um, we've been able to establish a hiking group. So we have two coaches, Lance and Nikki. Both of them are certified mountain guides. Both of them are certified personal trainers. Both of them, um, do bouldering. They do like really long distance hiking, um, mountaineering, like this is their jam, right? And so I'm basically like, build a program. Mm-hmm. bring it to me. Let's make sure everything clicks and works and let's figure out, you know, what we wanna charge for this extra service. Cause this is your specialty, and then let's put it out there. Mm-hmm. . So first year hiking program, we had 13 attendees. Uh, we had two scholarship attendees, and yeah, they, they did I think six big hikes. And, uh, the feedback was great. Like people really had a good time. Um, they were challenged. There were people of all fitness levels. So again, like when we talk about like inclusivity or, you know, people being in different places with their fitness, um, we had people who were new to fitness who were pretty deconditioned all the way up to people who were like very experienced hikers and everybody was able to be a part of this. Okay. So we did like a, a base charge for that charge. Like, Hey, you know, six weeks, I can't remember what we charge. I think we charged $370 for six hikes. Um, it also included six one hour workouts that elevate, um, the program was called Fit to Hike. So the goal was to help people basically start to be conditioned for hikes, but also to help them maintain and improve their, um, their strength, their stability, their coordination, um, their balance and mobility and their ankles, their knees and their hips. Um, but it was all very specific to helping them be better hikers. Okay, cool. So that was the first big program that we launched. Um, second program that we've launched recently. Um, Megan, one of my coaches, she is a prenatal and postpartum fitness specialist. Um, she has multiple certifications and education background in serving women, um, who are either expecting or recovering their body after having children. Um, and her program is amazing. She's probably the most thorough human I've ever met in my life. , um, . But she's lived it, right? So she has two babies of her own. Um, she knows what it's like to go through pregnancy, to have to, you know, bring yourself back to a place where you, you know, really feel strong in your own body. So it's not so much about, I wanna lose the weight, or I wanna, you know, be, um, more fit than I was before I got pregnant. Like, her approach is holistic. Like, she wants you to feel good in your own body, right? And for some of us, it's gonna look very different than I wanna lose 30 pounds or 60 pounds. It's like, I wanna feel strong. Mm-hmm. , you know, and I think Megan really shines in terms of helping people, not just women, but people in general, you know, find their own strengths again. Mm-hmm. . And so she started this new program. Um, there's four classes a week. They're 45 minute classes, and it's, we've called it Elevate Moms. Um, but it's, it's working with that demographic and enrollment is open. So if you are still thinking about trying a class, you know, or if you love it, we do punch cards. Um, it's a separate service outside of our normal class membership because again, it is her specialty and it is her, you know, taking her time to really build these programs specifically for these women. So, um, in the future, we have a cycling program coming, um, from Coach Holly. Yeah. And Holly is, um, a newly certified personal trainer. She just recently passed her NASM certification, which is, it's a big deal. Um, that test is not easy. That's, that's the certification I hold. And it took me over a year of self-study to feel ready to take that test. Um, but she's developed a really, really nice, and what I think will be really effective program. Um, and we have quite a few people who are interested in doing this with her. So, um, stay tuned for more information on that. But yeah, so that's coming. Um, and then in addition to that, we also have, uh, an onsite physical therapist, Greg Spooner. And he has started doing, um, free workshops for the community, not just the Elevate community, but his community of clients and, you know, Bainbridge Island general population community. So he's trying to, um, one, bring awareness to the fact that he does have a business here on Bainbridge and his, uh, practices run out of Elevate Space. So he, he runs space from us and, um, basically you'll see him working with clients in our gym and we share the space with him. So he's been a really great, um, addition to our business model. So he's got, I think, a, uh, hip pain workshop tonight. Oh. And I, I think it starts at 6 45. Yeah. Anyway, I'll find the link, I'll send it to you. And then he is got another one coming up in December. So, yeah, Danielle (31:30):I mean, look, you went from like being, like managing a business a few years ago to then working out in parks and in people's driveways to having your own space, and not only doing classes and personal training, but all of the programs you're launching. It's amazing. Bethanee (31:48):It feels really good to see it all kind of coming together. And, you know, if I think back to, let's see what, it's 2022. So 2015 before I started working on Bainbridge, um, I was working at the Y M C A making minimum wage. I was working at a local nutrition store making minimum wage. I was going to college full-time, and I was working in a restaurant, and I was, you know, living day to day . And it was very, very hard. Um, but I knew for, I just, I knew that if I kept going down this path, that things would be okay and and Mm, you know, I think all the way up through the pandemic, I sorry to hear my dog snoring . Um, like I know what it feels like to like really struggle, you know? And to finally feel like I have some roots in something. I have some equity in something. I mean, it's a really powerful feeling. Like I am 32 years old. I think it's taken me most of my, you know, working adult life. I've been working since I was 15, um, to feel like I, I'm rooted mm-hmm. , and, you know, I'm not rolling in money. I'm not , you know, but I, but I, I feel like I've worked, you know, pretty hard to have some stability in my life and I have it mm-hmm. Um, but I wouldn't have it without my community, and I would not have it without my staff. So I just wanna really shine some light on that, that, you know, the people around me have made it so that, you know, we can all benefit from this. Um, like as much as I wanna take care of myself, I wanna take care of the people that work with me. Mm-hmm. , absolutely. Like, I want my staff to feel like it's worthwhile for them, not just, um, in a rewarding sense of helping other people find their own power, but, you know, like, can I survive on this? And so, um, yeah. You know, while my, my biggest goal is wanting to serve my community, I, I wanna, I wanna serve people that work for me too. Danielle (33:53):Yeah. How, how do you look at when you come to a new year? Do you have goals or hopes for the new year? Even? Like, thoughts about what you're doing in your community? Like, or do you get there when you get there? Or like, how does that work for you? Bethanee (34:10):Yeah. Um, I have some big goals. Uh, I feel like if I, if I try to do too much at once, that's when I get, you know, everything gets jumbled. It takes way longer than it should. So, so what I've been practicing is just kind of attacking one thing at a time. , instead of having, you know, 15 irons in the fire as like, I have two, you know, and that feels, that feels good. Um, one of my biggest goals is to get involved more in our youth community. Um, and we already, we already do that to some extent. You know, I work with the Bainbridge Island Rowing community, and this year I think there's about 80 youth, um, participants in that program that I'm working with. And that's just one way that I have some outreach into the youth community. Um, I'd love to do some seasonal sports training, um, whether it be with the cross country team, I do work, work with some football kids and some water polo kids already. So basically growing those connections, um, with the youth sports. Um, but I've also had an introduction to Bainbridge Youth Services, um, which is an organization on our island that helps teens work through all kinds of things, whether it's at risk, teens, um, finding help, whether it's teens needing mental health, um, um, resources. Um, like I wanna become, I want Elevate to become a hub for, um, basically working with the youth and being a resource for them, being an anchor for them and whatever that looks like. So whether it's through fitness, you know, know, maybe it's through stretching, maybe it's through just finding, you know, some sort of mentorship program. Um, that's really important to me. Mm-hmm. . And, you know, I've been really lucky to work with mostly the adult population on Bainbridge, um, and some youth stuff sprinkled in, but I'd really like to dig a little bit deeper into that and, and, you know, build on that. Um, and that's gonna take some work in other ways, but I've got some stuff moving and some people helping me with that, so I'm really excited about that. Um, I also would like to expand, you know, my business visibility in terms of being a safe place for people, um, who may not, uh, feel like they fit in in a normal gym setting. So, uh, one thing I've really enjoyed, especially in the last year, is meeting more of our local, um, trans community, um, meeting more of our local non-binary community. Um, especially in like, again, like the youth here. Like, there's a lot of change happening and there are a lot of people who are, you know, becoming more comfortable being their authentic selves or feeling like they're in a place where they can, you know, join a gym or find a community or be friends or, I just, I'm seeing a lot of that happening right now. And, you know, I want Elevate to be like a giant beacon of like, acceptance for everybody. Um, yeah, I'd love to obviously increase my membership. Um, , I, uh, that's always a goal, right? How I would love to serve more people, um, right. As far as, you know, personal training, I have the world's best training clients. Um, some of my clients have been training with me for almost a decade, Danielle. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of them have been here with me since I moved here, so 2015. And I feel very lucky. Um, yeah, I feel like this is not a normal thing. Like it's great, you know, but in, you know, where I live before, I'm not sure if I would've had this type of longevity with people. And I think, you know, people have the resources here to make it long term, and even if they don't, but they wanna be hero, you know, we figure it out. Um, but yeah, the only, the only other big goal that I've got is just helping my staff grow and, you know, become stronger coaches or, you know, work on skills that they wanna work on if they already are strong coaches. And, yeah. So, Danielle (38:00):Well, Bethany, if someone like is listening and they're like, and they're maybe not in the area, like maybe you can put a link in for your gym, or if they wanna give to your scholarship fund or, you know, pay someone's membership. Like, I would love anybody who's listening to just join that so we can get that in the notes or whatnot. Bethanee (38:18):Yeah. Yeah. I'll drop that. Danielle (38:23):Thank you for joining us on The Arise podcast. And I just wanted to give a little shout out that the website is elevatestrengthco.com. And when you, you get on that website, there's a couple different tabs you can hit. You can hit get Started, there's a link to their Facebook and Instagram page, group fitness, personal training, get to know the team and some of the values that Elevate holds. So check it out. 

Website is reclamationcounseling.net and my instagram is @reclamationcounselingllcJenn is a therapist and writer who resides in Mobile, Alabama. She is also currently working as a fellow with the Allender Center. A lifelong resident of the south and a mother of four wild and remarkable daughters, she is passionate about reclamation. She loves to see those who know the legacy of trauma carve new paths forward and reclaim their voices, their bodies, and their stories - that they may truly live. She is currently taking new clients for therapy within the states of Alabama and Florida and also has story work coaching availability for those across the country.Danielle:Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and healing. And today, I'm so honored to be joined by a therapist and a colleague, Jennifer Jordan. We talk a little bit about spiritual abuse and its impacts, so, uh, link in notes to get ahold of her bio and find out how you can hear more from her. Just so honored to have this conversation. Yeah. It's, it's really good to be with you. You know, I got, I got to know Jen a little bit. Do you prefer Jen or Jennifer?Okay. I got to know you a little bit through our, when we intersected at a training course at the Lander Center, and we were in the same group, and I was like, oh, I like that woman. Um, I loved your vulnerability, your skill as a facilitator. I trusted you, and then just who you emanated as a person. And so it feels really like an honor to get to talk with you in this space, like on a podcast. So thank you for coming.Jennifer  (01:44):Yeah. I'm so glad to be here and like, echo everything you're saying, like it feels really fun and exciting and like, um, uh, an honor to get to have this conversation. Mm-hmm. , you know, outside of the context that I've known you previously, so.Danielle (02:00):Right. Um, you know, like, I don't know if you're familiar with my pod, with our podcast, but, um, Maggie is on a break right now, like doing grad school and doing other things. But a lot of what we've noticed since the pandemic and since we've started talking on the podcast is how much spiritual abuse has been highlighted. Of course, prior to even, I think that awareness was the me Too movement, and then just patriarchy just seems like dripping every, like in all the systems we operate in mm-hmm. . And so yeah. As a clinician, as a therapist, like, before we jump into that, just love to hear like, what are you doing, where are you located, and what are your passions around serving, uh, people?Jennifer (02:49):Yeah, so I'm in Mobile, Alabama, down in the south, um, working as a therapist. Um, so I see clients, um, see clients in, um, Alabama and Florida, and then also offer some, um, a bit of a different service story work, consultation to people outside of, um, those states. But, um, really, really passionate. Um, my, my, my practice is called Reclamation Counseling. I feel super passionate about helping people to reclaim, um, what's been taken. Um, whether that's, um, their, their bodies, right, their voices, um, or just their stories have kind of been co-opted into a larger narrative, um, that, that removes their personhood and their individuality, um, and their culture. Um, I think that that's, that's my passion. I think it comes out in different ways, um, depending on the type of, uh, client that I'm working with. But, um, that's what I'm, that's what I'm about. And, and it's a major, it's a major thing for me. It's a big deal for me because that's been so much of my story. Um, and so, yeah, that, that's where I'm at. That's what I do. It's what I'm about.Danielle (04:02):I love that idea though. Like reclaiming, I think you said bodies and stories mm-hmm. . So when you think about that reclaiming process, like what do you see happening for clients or people you work with or maybe in your own life, if you can just speak to that a little bit.Jennifer (04:20):Yeah. So there's so much overlap there certainly, um, but overlap in terms of, um, like what I see happening with my clients and then what I see happening with myself. Um, but, you know, at the root, um, like naming the truth of the stories, the stories of both our personal individual lives within our families of origin, but then also, um, the larger narrative, like the stories of our ancestors, the stories of the culture that we come from, um, and, and as we piece together the truth of those stories, um, and, and, and the ways that, um, buying into, um, falsified stories, um, have cost us, um, that process of reclamation can begin. Um, and so, you know, you talk about spiritual abuse and patriarchy and pure culture and, um, and, and, you know, white supremacists, like all these things are so overlaid and so, um, so connected. But, um, so much of my process has been, um, like naming these multiple layers, these multiple layers of harm, um, that have like, been the building blocks on which my particular stories of harm have have been laid. And so, um, yeah, pulling the stories apart, naming the, naming the truth of the stories and then, um, like what, what has buying into, um, the, the, the false narrative of somebody else cost me? And what do I wanna take back as my own?Danielle (06:00):Hmm. Oh, when you think about that, like take back as your own and, and the intersection between, you know, you named a lot of layers. Yeah. Um, would you be able to speak a little more particularly to patriarchy and spiritual abuse?Jennifer (06:14):Yeah. So, um, you know, I, um, sharing some of my story, um, that, that's kind of the lens that I, I typically think through. Uh, I think we all do that, but, um, it's, it's what I'm most expert in, I guess. Um, uh, you know, if I think that this is true within many, um, evangelical circles, I think that being in the south, being raised in the deep south, um, in soybean fields on a farm, um, there's, there's an added layer to this, but, um, so much of what it means to be a good, good Christian girl, um, is to be, uh, what the, the system of patriarchy demands, um, of, of a female child. And, and so, um, you know, I learned at a very early age what was, what was, uh, most well received by the men, um, in my family, um, which was also kind of the spiritual context that I was raised in.Um, and so I, I became really expert at doing that. And in that lost a lot of my voice, uh, lost a lot of my body, um, and also like gained some things that I've had to lay down. Um, and so yeah, it, it's been, I mean, there's, so, I mean, even as I'm starting to kind of name the reality, right? I feel the weight of the layers and I feel the just memories coming back and, um, uh, just, just the reality that it's been, been a process of kind of crawling out of a hole. And, um, I think for many of us who have, who have had that experience of, um, like our, our, our position and existence as a female wedded within, um, patriarchal spiritual systems, um, and then you put like the, the intricacies of like how white supremacy connects into that. Um, it, it is like there are layers and layers and layers and layers and layers to kind of dig out of. And so, um, I feel that even as I'm starting to name some of those truths,Danielle (08:28):Right? And I hear in what you're saying that you're able to hold or talk about, like, yeah, I, I lost these things, and and maybe you can say exactly what, even if it's general, what you, what a person tends to lose in that group. Yeah. And then I also gained some things. Yeah.Jennifer (08:50):Yeah. So, you know, I i going to, going into what I lost, um, you know, there is a very, um, particular thing that happens to me even now as a, as a 35 year old adult, right? That I've, I've done so much work around and have fought to ground my body in the midst of, but there is something that happens when, um, a man who has positional or spiritual authority, um, speaks to me. And, um, it, it, I've described it as almost like a brainwashing, um, a Halloween out, um, a a robotic falling in line, um, and a pleasant expression. Um, and so, so in that, you know, there's the loss of, of my own response, um, my own, uh, choice to disagree or agree, um, my own emotion, um, because kind of having a big emotional response was not, not okay. Um, and also, um, just the, the reality of the truth that my body holds in those moments, um, it, it, there's no space for it.And so, yeah, learned from a very early age that that really needs to be set aside, which that in and of itself set me up for lots of other harm later down the road. Of course. Yeah. Um, but, but yeah, those are the things that it lost that I lost. But I think, you know, navigating what that gained me and my complicity within that, um, is, is a such a, like a concept that is so full of grief, um, and, and almost like it feels maddening to consider, but it, it, like we have to face it. Like I, as a southern white woman have to face that, right? Um, and so, um, it, it, it got me specialness, it got me preference and privilege mm-hmm. , um, it got me protection mm-hmm. , um, it got me, um, a voice even though it wasn't my own mm-hmm. . Um, I had, I had a space to exist where others didn't mm-hmm. , um, and it, it, and it got me the reputation of being, um, what I didn't wanna be and also what I wanted to be, which was, um, pure and preferred and desired. Um, and so there's a lot of complexity there, certainly, um, and a lot to grieve and, and much more to name, I'm sure. But those, those are some of the first thoughts I have.Danielle (11:31):It is kind of a miracle if anybody makes a 20 years of like, but when we got married, Luis, uh, came from Mexico on a fiance visa, and, um, he crossed, he was able to cross the border sooner than we thought because the visa came through so quickly, and then we had 90 days to get married. And so that 90 day window, we had scheduled our wedding for November, and I, it, we were out of the window for getting married. So the church wedding was in November. So he came up, we needed to get married, and the sooner we got married, then the sooner we could roll on the legal paperwork. Right. So we found a judge, the judge came to my parents' living room, and I remember telling him, like, and mind you, this is a guy not raised in purity culture, not raised in the strict evangelical setting. I was raised in telling him like, we can't have sex until we're married at the church because we're not married in front of God. And he's like, what? What do you mean? Like, ? Like, we're getting married. But I was like, no. Like, I'm convinced. So we got married in front of the judge, and I remember we got married, and I remember telling him like, I feel married. He's like, we're married.I had like kind of proclaimed my purity in a sense to friends and family, like, we're not gonna have sex until we're married at the church. Mm-hmm. , and I was praised for that. Mm-hmm. , like, we were admired for that. And I remember even one time my parents went outta town and Louis was living there, and I made him, I locked him out onto the front porch to like avoid the quote unquote appearance of evil.Wow. I just, as you know, 20 years came up. People are like, why do you have two wedding anniversaries? I'm like, actually, it's purity culture.Gosh. But I think of the status even I gained in my family, gained by me holding to some false narrative of what, what marriage actually meant mm-hmm. that somehow it wasn't in the sight of God because it was a judge. Mm-hmm. . And so I did gain access and privilege, and I think in the meantime, Luis was like, well, I really love this woman. Like, what are we doing? Yeah. I'm just gonna go along . But that, I mean, that story's been so present in my mind as you share, like, uh, they, I did hold a sense of pride in that time mm-hmm. mm-hmm. , look what I did like Yeah. Yeah. And was praised for it among friends and family, you know? Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm.Jennifer (14:14):. Oh, yeah. Yes. I mean, look at how, yeah. And there's something of the, the holy struggle there too, right? That makes it even that much more admirable. Like, oh, we're, we're married, but we're not, actually, we're gonna, we're in a way, you know, there's, there's, yeah. That's complex. But yeah, I mean, I feel that, I feel that I feel, um,In a, in the, the system I was raised in, um, which was highly patriarchal, uh, my grandfather was Greek is Greek, um, but, but just high, high, highly patriarchal, um, kind of extended family system that I lived in the middle of. Um, and, and women had a few jobs, um, which was, you know, to safe in and cook good meals and, um, and, and don't have emotional outbursts. Um, and so in that, in that, that place, like I felt very invisible, right? And so to, to be really pure and really, um, good and what they needed me to be, um, felt like it got, it got some of the attention that I was so longing for. Um, so it's really, it's really quite a trap, um, to be in the middle ofOh, that's a great question. Um, and a complex question because I think the truth of the answer to that question is that I was really good. I was really good at being what everybody wanted me to be, um, really, really good at it. Um, and even in, in places where I wasn't so good at it, I was really good at hiding. Um, so I, I kept the appearance of, um, of, of, of what everybody wanted, um, and, and, uh, and it, it enabled me to survive, but also, um, caused my death in many ways. SoDanielle (16:24):Yeah. There's something about that type of survival where you have to kill off who God created you to be. Mm-hmm. that, and I'm not saying the survival is unholy, but what's required of us to survive in the system is an unholiness mm-hmm. in a system that's proclaiming Yes. This is the way to be more holy. Right?Jennifer (16:49):Yeah. Yeah. I mean it, I mean, try, I'm trying to put word more words around that, and it, I just feel kind of the madness of it, right? Like the madness of to exist here and belong here, I need to be a certain thing. Um, and yet to be that certain thing means that I, I have to forsake and kill off so much of, of like the truth of who I am, and so either I'm cast out or I'm, um, or I'm being a fraud to stay. Um, and so it, it's, it's a, it's a bind.Danielle (17:24):Mm-hmm. when you feel that bind, I think there's always, like, you know, as therapist, we like talk about, like, let's highlight the bind. Yeah. And sometimes I'm like, well, what good is that? Yeah. Thanks for intensifying it, but like, how the heck do we get out? Or how the heck is this made Right. Or redeemed? And just curious, like, where does your mind go? Not that you have the answer and need to have the answer, but how do you meander through that for yourself or for clients?Jennifer (17:55):Dude, I mean, I think the, the first thing that comes to mind is just, um, like being willing to feel the grief of, of the unspeakable bind that, that, that position is. Um, and, and I think the grief brings us softness, um, that enables us to, um, feel our hearts again, , if, if that makes sense. Because I, I think that there's so much hardness required, um, to exist in that bind. And so I think that grief brings us softness that then allows us to face the truth a bit more, a bit more realistically. And then I think that, that if we are in a system that requires that of us, um, like we have to, we have to make the hard choice to face our complicity, and we have to make the hard choice to, to, to crawl our way out of that. And I know in my experience, like that has not been pretty, and that has not been easy. Um, but I think that, I think that like we have a, we know we see the truth, like we have to do something with it.Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think hardening and I think like, um, just in existence, that that hollow is the, the best word to describe it, um, in existence, that that looks, looks pretty good, looks really good to people within the system. Um, but I think internally, um, like there, there are places within us that know that it's not, it's not real. It's not, it's not full, it's not authentic. Um, so yeah.Danielle (19:53):Yeah. I love that way. You talk about it like, first entering the grief, being willing to grieve both the ways we've been complicit in the ways we've been harmed and like that feeling. I think what I heard you say is what brings kind of that alignment mm-hmm. for our heart back online. Mm-hmm. , I just think it's like so crazy to me that in order to acquire belonging or acquire acceptance, we actually have to deny who God created us to be. Mm-hmm. .Jennifer (20:26):I agree. And it makes you question like, okay, if that's what's happening here right then, then what is, this is what's the good in this,Like, if, if we're all created uniquely in the image of God and, and the mission is that we would be more in alignment with that and be, be bringing God's kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven. Like if that's, if that's the goal and this, this system and structure, um, that is coded in spiritual candy, um, if you will, like, if it's requiring us to set aside those particularities to who we are, um, you know, I, you have to question like, Craig, what's the intent here? And I think the truth is a lot of the intent is like to hold power and supremacy. It's not to really do the, do the, the mission quote unquote mission of Jesus.Danielle (21:28):Right. Then I come to like, well, is that faith or religion or a cult or what's going on here? Because, because when I look back I'm like, well, well the, like, I can't deny what I read in the Bible. I can't deny what I felt Jesus. And yet I can say that where I was at was harming so many other people. Mm-hmm. , including myself., and how do I make sense of that? How do I make sense of learning about Jesus, learning about God learning, like, I'll just never forget, like around the whole abortion issue, the whole thing is like you're fearfully and wonderfully made mm-hmm. , and yet they don't want what God fearfully and wonderfully made once you're born and thinking and moving.So then I'm like, well, what, what? Like, what was I really was that Yeah.Jennifer (22:16):Yeah. I feel that intensely. And I think, um, I don't, you know, the question remains because it is, it is, you know, this I think for so many of us that are, that are pulling our way out of systems that have been harmful to us, right. Like these are, this is the place where I was introduced to the thing I most care about in my life. This is the place where I was introduced to the person of Jesus. And, and I don't know where I would be without that. And yet, um, to really be in alignment with Jesus, I have had to peel back all the other pieces of, of what else this system gave me. Right. The other messages. And so I hear you. I mean, I think it is just, it, it is a question. And I do think that there are, uh, I think that we can't, you know, we can't deny the, the pursuit of power mm-hmm. and comfort mm-hmm. and, and, and wanting to hold onto like black and white truth cuz it's comfortable and easy to stomach. Um,Danielle (23:30):Yeah. When you talk about reclaiming, I think for, for me, what I come back to is part of what I reclaimed is that Jesus showed up to me in a lot of spaces where he actually wasn't even welcome , but he introduced himself to meThrough almost a false narrative about him, but he, he showed up in himself, which is how I came to faith mm-hmm. and how I see my faith moving despite, despite the falsification of who he wasJennifer (24:04):Yeah. Which is so wild, like, and beautiful. Right. And, and just points to like his I amenity mm-hmm. that goes beyond these systems that, um, make him something other than he is. Um, but yeah. I love that. I love reclaiming, um, I love the way you said that, that in, in these systems where it was, you know, in fact wasn't very welcome like that in those places, he introduced himself to you. Mm-hmm. . I love that. And I feel that, feel that too. YouDanielle (24:44):Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted. Um, no, you're good. Jen. When you think about that reclaiming process then for, for your clients or for someone who's listening, being like, I actually can't leave the system, or Sure. You don't understand if I leave, I'm gonna lose my family. Mm-hmm. , you don't understand if I say anything about white supremacy or share anything about what I'm voting for, I might lose my entire community. Like when someone walks into your office in that situation, what, what do you do with that?Jennifer (25:18):Yeah, I mean, I, I I mean first thing is like validate because it's true. It probably is true. I mean, and, and, and I think that that reality points so strongly to the truth of the situation that that individual is in, right? The truth of that system, that there really is no space for individuality. Um, and, and that to begin to speak up or to begin to move out of that, um, can't have great cost. Um, I think that, that that's a truth that needs to be acknowledged. And, and, um, you know, I so acknowledging that, that that's a reality. Um, and I, I think with a lot of kindness, the question I would pose to that person would be, um, I don't know, I, I, you know, at at what, what's it, what, what is it costing you to, to, to, what is it costing you, um, to remain, right? Like, like cuz there is a big cost to leave. Like there is a huge cost, um, that, and you need support, you need resources, and you need, um, you know, people who, uh, can, can be with you in the grief of all that it will cost. Um, and I think just in the, the quiet like pondering of our own soul, we have to, we have to be willing to face what is it costing me of me to not do something? Um, and I think it begins with like very small Cause my experience was that like, it wasn't like being within a system, it wasn't just about the system, it was about the ways that I had been groomed mm-hmm. to not think, groomed, to not ask questions, groomed to not like Yeah. I mean, even ask a question, just say, Hey, like, why does this have to be this way?Mm-hmm. like, I, I like those things didn't even cross my mind. And so I think like, it, it, it, in truth, I think it has to begin very small, um, with the grounding of your body, the telling of the stories and safe spaces so that there can be an increment of change toward, um, toward peeling back those layers of grooming Right. To where you can't ask a question and, and, and, and do the work to hold your own. Um, and trust that a series of those little moments of reclaiming your own voice and your own body and your own opinion and your own sense of who Jesus is, um, can accumulate and you, you doing what you need to do, whether that's leaving or whether that's staying and trying to be a voice for good, a voice for change. So that, that's kind of a framework that I think through.Danielle (28:17):Yeah. I like the way you put that. Like, it, like, I think a lot of us think like change is going to be like, suddenly I just like tear the building down mm-hmm. or burn all the books that were, you know, like cult like . I think often the longest change is so incremental, which makes it so painful.But more sustainable, I think. Mm-hmm. it doesn't mean you don't lose what you were fearful you lose in the end. Sure. You still may lose all of those things, but you do gain a lot by through incremental change. Mm-hmm.Jennifer (28:53): certainly. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, you gain the, the beauty of who you are apart from that and, and, and you gain the, the feeling of, um, like I am being true to my own knowing, my own sense of right and wrong, my own, um, you know, my own spirituality. Um, and, and you know, I think it, it always is such a motivator for, for us as parents, um, to when we, when we know that what we're doing will have generational implications, right? It's like there is the potential for so much loss, even in the incremental changes that can't be denied, but to have a generational forward, like a, a forward facing view of what might be gained beyond my generation, should I be willing to take these incremental steps that, that could lead to major loss? Like is, is a worthwhile, worthwhile gain, um, just to give my kids a different chance, you know, just to give them like, like the beginning of a different narrative.So my website is reclamation counseling.net. Um, and I'm also on Instagram, um, building a presence there. It's at Reclamation Counseling llc. Um, so those are probably the two best, best places to find me. Um, but yeah, I'd love to connect and, um, I really, I feel so passionate, like you wanna come along alongside people who are asking them really hard questions and, and doing the really hard work of incremental change, um, within their stories that can lead to bigger waves of change outside of them. So yeah.Danielle (30:55):I wonder what you would tell someone who can't even pick up the phone or send an email or an Instagram message. Like, what, what do you tell that person that isn't up to doing that part of the labor? Like, what's your word forJennifer (31:09):Them? Oh man, that question like, brings tears to my eyes because, um, that just feels like very, like I remember those days mm-hmm. . Um, and I, I would say stay curious. Like, just stay curious, keep reading. Um, know that if you're not there yet, that's okay. And yet, like listen, listen to and honor that voice inside of you that's like wanting something more for yourself and wanting something more for your kids. Even like, don't, don't deny that there's time, there's space. Um, but keep, even if it's a little step of listening to another podcast or picking up a book or, um, you know, like asking the questions in a journal cuz you don't have anybody you can talk to about 'em. Like stay with that, that voice inside of you and stay curious.Danielle (32:04):Yeah. Well just thank you so much for your wisdom. So there's three questions that we usually wrap up with. It's what are you reading, what are you listening to, and who, or what's inspiring you?Jennifer (32:16):Okay. So, um, I'm reading The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Yeah. So trying to recover some practices of creativity and, um, it's been very disruptive and good for my life. Um, so yeah, I'm reading that, um, listening to Part from, you know, podcast. Uh, music wise, I've been listening to three things depending on who's in the car with me. Um, the Hamilton soundtrack, um, zombies, three soundtrack or, um, the new Taylors Swift album. So those are the three things that have been playing for me recently. And then, um, what's the last question? Are you inspired by Yeah. Who are you inspired by? Oh, man. Gosh, so many people, um, faith who are like, who are still speaking up and who have the courage to continue to be that prophet voice in the wilderness, like in the face of such violence, um, and, and, and dishonesty, um, from so many, um, other people of faith. Um, so I, I feel very inspired by those voices. So, and you're included in that, Danielle. Oh, thanks man. Appreciate your voice. Yeah. I'm inspired by this conversation, so we gotta do this again. Yeah, I would love that. I would love that. Yeah. Yeah.  

From Danielle: "Alethea is a skilled facilitator, and compassionate truth teller - and all around good people. Alethea teaches me, through her way of moving in the world, to continue to use my own voice. I know her to bring her awareness in difficult spaces for herself and others in moving towards healing. Alethea lives her life through the lens of love."I would be honored to co-host a podcast with her any time. She is also a DEI consultant, lives in Atlanta, GA, and loves being an auntie! Is...." A Black woman. Love being a black woman. Proud to be a black woman single, live in Atlanta, Georgia. Love it here. One of the homes of the civil rights movement. So it's been great to live here. And I love, one of the things I love about living here is I'm in the majority in a lot of places, which I was not used to prior to six years ago when I moved here. So it's part of, I feel like who I am and what I get to experience in my day to day, which is refreshing. I have served in the non-profit sector for the last 10 years specifically in a sports ministry context. But over time, that evolved to getting into doing work around training and development in the areas of race, power, privilege, ethnicity, culture in the gospel. And so really for my own journey, one understanding of how being a racialized person in a racialized society, what my experience has been. And I didn't have language for a lot of my experiences until I was probably 27 years old and realized that God cares about that. So that was just so new to me. So I feel like part of who I am is helping others understand themselves first and foremost of how they experience the world, how they show up in the world how they navigate the world. And then adding the faith perspective in as well and combining the two. And so that's very much a part of who I am is our history as followers of Jesus in this sense matters, but also who we are as people in whatever place we call home. For me it's here in the US in Atlanta, Georgia."   Danielle (00:40):Welcome To the ARise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender and healing. And just wanna welcome a colleague and a dear friend. She's located in the Atlanta area and she gives herself a robust introduction here and I love it because it is who she is. She about belonging, she is about being with others in their stories. She's about being authentic and true to what she believes. And I'm just so honored to have her with me today and it's election season. So we're gonna get into it and talk a little bit about that belonging Tiffany Cross from MSNBC whose contract wasn't renewed. And I encourage you to listen in and with curiosity and hold space for any kind of resistance you feel and just be curious about that and jump in with us. I mean, let's get into it. But Alicia, tell me a little bit about who you are, what you do. Yeah, jump in. Who are you?Alethea (01:52):, who am I? That's a great question. Are you? I am a black woman. Love being a black woman. Proud to be a black woman single, live in Atlanta, Georgia. Love it here. One of the homes of the civil rights movement. So it's been great to live here. And I love, one of the things I love about living here is I'm in the majority in a lot of places, which I was not used to prior to six years ago when I moved here. So it's part of, I feel like who I am and what I get to experience in my day to day, which is refreshing. I have served in the non-profit sector for the last 10 years specifically in a sports ministry context. But over time, that evolved to getting into doing work around training and development in the areas of race, power, privilege, ethnicity, culture in the gospel. And so really for my own journey, one understanding of how being a racialized person in a racialized society, what my experience has been. And I didn't have language for a lot of my experiences until I was probably 27 years old and realized that God cares about that. So that was just so new to me. So I feel like part of who I am is helping others understand themselves first and foremost of how they experience the world, how they show up in the world how they navigate the world. And then adding the faith perspective in as well and combining the two. And so that's very much a part of who I am is our history as followers of Jesus in this sense matters, but also who we are as people in whatever place we call home. For me it's here in the US in Atlanta, Georgia.So that's very much part of who I am. That's the type of work I do. And so now I've transitioned, I'm still in a nonprofit space but transitioned to a different space and continuing that work. So under the, what the other people call it, under the umbrella of dei, you know, everyone's like dei, what is that? I thought it was more common, I say it than people ask me, but diversity, equity, and inclusion. I've seen some people adding the B on there belonging, which is very intriguing to me. Brene Brown just has a two part podcast two part series on her podcast that she put out with two women of color. And I listened to part one about a week ago and was like, Oh, okay, this is some good stuff for me to think about. So anyway, so that's what the type of work I'm involved in.(But for me, it's not just a job, it's what I feel like to commit my life to right now. I feel very much a calling and a commitment to that type of work because it matters if we can see and how polarized just our country is not even thinking about the world cuz then we get into it. Even more matters there. But anyway, so that's part of who I am. I live in the context of community. Community is very important to me. So it hadn't been prior to 10 years ago I didn't understand the value of community but I knew I was longing for it. I knew something was missing. And so I feel like very part of much of who I am is being my connected to community. And I have an awesome community of people around me, both here in Atlanta and all over the country.I feel like when you hear people talk about me, one of the things that they will say is Alethia highly values her people. And I do. And so that, that's very significant to me, very much part of who I am. And I love being an auntie. I'm an auntie. It's my favorite title. I would probably say I love being a sister and a cousin, a friend, all that. But auntie is by far my favorite title of any title I've ever had. Lots of nieces and nephews part of my larger family, not just blood related but I love, love those kiddos and get to see one of my nephews next week, which I'm really excited about. But that's very much part of who I am. If you know me, I love being an auntie. So yeah, some of who I am,Danielle (05:55):I could see why you would want the word belonging in there. Cause I mean your story is about not only belonging to others but being belonged to.Alethea (06:04):Yes. And it's just been good for me to start reading some more about D E I B and just the significance of having belonging on the end of that. We belong to one another. One of the things some of my colleagues that we work together, we say we're better together and that's part of what we're trying to one live out but also help other people understand as well. And so I just love that. I don't feel like I can add it yet. I don't know, I feel like I'm just learning. So it feels weird to be like, yeah, I'm doing D E I D and it's like I'm still trying to figure out that part. But the more I read about it, the more I hear people talk about it in their work, the more I'm like, yeah, that actually is a significant part of it. Cuz if people don't understand that who we belong to and what belonging looks like and how to understand that, we're gonna miss out on some of those other elements that we're trying to reach people with.Danielle (07:00):Yeah, I mean as a Latina, as a Mexican, I'm like, yeah, if we don't belong then it just feels bad. , we see that playing out across society right now. So yeah,Right so we were talking, you and me were like, hey, I was like hey we should do a podcast together. And we were like, what should we talk about? And I gave you seven things, and at the end I was like, well what about if something comes up? And here we are on election day and you texted me last night and you texted me this story about Tiffany Cross and we'll jump into that. But I mean how can we even jump into that without saying where we are literally today? And I mean you're in Georgia and it feels to me out here in Seattle, Washington, we are very interested in what happens in Georgia.Alethea (07:48):A lot of people are, yes, it feels reminiscent of the 2020 election. Again, all eyes on Georgia, it was very funny, I was getting text as I was going to bed, I'm watching the polling numbers for Georgia from people that don't live here. I said, yeah, I gotta stop, I gotta go to bed. But yeah, it is all eyes I know on us among a few other states as well. But yeah, it's huge. Stacy Abrams running for governor again her race in 2018 was wild. And I still was talking to someone recently and they were like, I was kind of surprised she ran again and I actually read her post this morning, she posted cuz people have asked that question, why would you run again when you have such a public loss? And I love what she talked about, about who she is, where she comes from, her connection to her family when she lost what she did and why she's running again.She has so much purpose, which I love, it's very clear for her. But yeah, it was a wild, 2018 was wild cuz Brian Kemp was the Secretary of state. So he was overseeing the election he was running in which I still to this day am baffled how is that legal ? But it's apparently it's legal here in Georgia. So yeah, we have a significant number of major seats up for election actually. So governor, lieutenant governor, Secretary of State Attorney General, and then the Georgia State Superintendent. And so big things going on here in Georgia. So yeah, big day here and I hope Stacey Abrams wins. I voted for her, I had such a warm feeling and smile on my face and I got to vote for her when I went to vote on Friday. But yeah, it's gonna be ING to see and her social media, it will continue to be a buzz as all eyes are on us today and probably into tomorrow as well.So I know some of the votes actually in one of our counties have until November 14th to get them in because Georgia is one of the many states that passed a voter suppression bill last year and SB 2 0 2. And that bill is very problematic. And one of the things, the issues in that bill, which we saw in one of many ways come out just the other day, which the A C L U got involved was there are over a thousand people in one of the counties that never got their absentee ballots. And they were supposed to because of in the bill, it changed the amount of time that people have to request their absentee ballot and then to get it in. And people, I don't think people knew that. But then what happened was it backed everything up and there's not enough officials to process some of the things.And so in Cobb County they didn't get over a thousand ballots out and so they were supposed to mail them on Friday overnight they did it. So the A C L U got involved, sued Cobb County and won yesterday. And so the ballots went out, I think last night overnighted, but they have until November 14th to get them in. So as I was reading this morning on the so informed Instagram page, every vote matters because of how close on those races are. So I'm be interesting to see how much those votes, while we wait for those to come in, will affect some of the larger things in the stateDanielle (11:07):. Yeah, it's interesting. I think people from around the country get hyper focused on something is something that is happening in another state. And I was just talking to an elder in our community and we have things that matter in our county, in our state that we also need to be, We can't just assume because Seattle's a blue area or Washington's blue that it doesn't matter that we don't vote for instance, there was millions of dollars poured in from out of state to run television ads for a particular conservative candidate and the ad was literally the Democrats have opened the border and two, there's a picture of a two year old getting supposedly killed by Fentanyl and it's because of immigrants. And you're just like, I was telling my friend, I was like, that happened in Washington. And we're like, yeah, that that situation necessarily happened but that the political money pouring in actually happened. , which I think really highlights a lot of why you sent me this article, , because whose voice matters, whose voteWho gets equal air time , who is allowed to say what they think , who's allowed to push conspiracy theories, who's allowed to push voter suppression, and whose voice actually get eliminated from the . So I mean you sent me this article on Tiffany Cross and I'm just curious how you came across it.Alethea (12:40):Yeah, I mean all over social media. So I think it was on Friday Tiffany Cross, she hosted it was called the Cross Connection on msnbc. It was a weekend show and I just open up Instagram and my feed is just filled with people responding and reacting to Tiffany Cross not having being fired or something. And I'm like, wait, what? So look into it some more and find out her contract wasn't renewed but they, MSNBC sever ties with her immediately, which is not common . And so social media obviously is in an uproar. So that's actually how I found out about it. Just some different accounts I follow everyone was talking about it. Tiffany Cross is a black woman for those who don't know. And she held I think a significant spot especially in talking about politics and things of that nature. And so for her contract to not be renewed, but for four days before the midterms for her, immediately her show was just done.It was very problematic. So again, that's how I initially found out about it. I've just been reading quite a bit about it. And I think too, for me as a black woman there Friday was, it was like that happened and then an album dropped where Meg, the stallion was very inappropriately targeted in the album by Drake and 21 Savage. And so I think for me there was also this other layer of, First it was about Meg, the stallion, so that's my social medias and then we find out Tiffany cross' show, she's just done, It's like, hold on, what's happening to black women today? So I think it was also compounded in that nature too. But yeah, that's how I found out about it was the buzz on social media,It's been thinking quite a bit about this over the last few days and it's just such an interesting thing to navigate, I think being a black woman and seeing what happens to black women in media and in public and things of that nature. And so there's this double whammy of what's happening where we're in election season and so it's like black women save us every time. Black women save us. Like, oh my gosh, we gotta get Stacy Abrams in first, black female governor. Black women are, we gotta get 'em out and they're gotta get people voting and we need black women, black women to save us. That's what it's been for the last few years. So you have this happening again now in 2022. And at the same time, black women are being targeted for who they are as people, which is what happened to Meg, the stallion or because of how they show up in a space, which is what happened to Tiffany Cross. And so yeah, it's interesting to watch it. Very problematic to watch it unfold in that sense of, so you want us when it's convenient, but don't do too much . Hey Tiffany, don't be that candid. Don't use that type of language. Be careful of how you say certain things. But we want you to for so you can reach an audience that our network is not reaching. So I looked it up msn nbc, part of the reason they brought on Tiffany Cross she is said, I wrote an article that her audience was 55% female, 35% African American. She was targeting a specific audience. That's part of the reason why MSNBC brought her on. So it was almost like, hey, we know people listen to you and people watch you and so it's going to help us and that's really what we care about, but we don't wanna deal with the heat that comes with that. So we can only handle it for so long. So after a couple years, we'll see you . And I feel like the thing that's very common with black women, it's like, hey, we know people listen to you. We know people follow you. We know that you hold a significant place in society, but we only want part of you. And when we're done with that part we'll throw it out. Move on. And so I feel like again, that's really what happened. I feel like what happened with Tiffany is another example of that which is not uncommon. I feel like for the black experience in particular being a black woman in this country.Danielle (16:50):I mean I read a couple articles and they called her far left. I was like, Oh what Oh, Far left about. And I wondered if they needed to mirror the fact that they're now calling these extreme conservatives. Far . When I started reading what was far left, it really wasn't her views, it was more the way she communicated. Weren't comfortable with her candid observations,She wasn't actually purporting certain ideologies, it was more like observations. So I found that very curious. Did you pick up on that? Yeah.Alethea (17:30):I mean I feel like that again happens all the time. So I think we live in such a polarized society right now that it's the easiest thing to do is to pinpoint people. They're either far right or far left, no in between. It feels like you're, you say one thing that has a tinge of what we deem progressive liberal so far outreaching because it's so counter to what people on the very far side of conservatism would say. You're just deemed you're far left. And I don't think that's a helpful thing to do. And essentially, cuz really look at what you did was, well what's her ideologies? What is it that she is portraying or talking about that would put her in this quote category that people are putting her in their Audi is, well that's not true, but it takes some work. You had to read some things to say, Is that really true?Cuz I don't really know, so let me find out. But we don't know how to do that. We just do a couple clicks. And someone else told me she's far left, so I just gotta believe that she's just as far left person because she had to come back to Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly and they're far, so she's gotta be far left. And I think that's just pretty sadly very common in our society right now is it's easy to categorize people. And so really no, let's get underneath that. What was she actually doing that you didn't like? didn't like how candid she was? You didn't like that She held a spot on a weekend show, the most watched weekend show, and it was on MSNBC and she's the second most watched weekend cable news show in America. In America on the weekends. People got time on the weekends, they're watching tv.It was the second most watch in all of America in the us. And so what you didn't like was she held a significant place in cable news and you didn't like how she very honestly talked about situations and people. Now was she kind of bra with her some of her wording? Yes, she was. I read some of the stuff that she said like I don't know if I would say that on cable news, but hey, we're different people. But again, it's like, well then where does the standard lie? Because Tucker Carlson can be that brash and be that racist and that sexist, that misogynistic and it's fine because that's just who he is. So it's okay. But if Tiffany does it now, it's a problem. Now we're not gonna renew your contract.Danielle (19:54):Yeah. I just have even a hard time. I'm not, I just feel like Tucker Carlson actually won a lawsuit saying he actually doesn't tell the truth. That's how he won the lawsuit. Right? He's like, Actually you can't be deceived by me cuz I don't tell the truth. So he gets to stay online. It's interesting. It's not interesting. It's not a surprise that he targeted her. And it's also not a surprise that he actually carries that much power. And MSNBC is supposedly more liberal,Alethea (20:29):Supposedly that part. Right? Supposedly there's supposed a close up part, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think I just had this thought too, when you're making that comment of he win the lawsuit by saying, Hey, I don't sell the truth, but the power that comes with that. So I was reflecting on, as I was prepping to vote, actually last week, I was going back through and actually reading the bill SB 2 0 2 of what the voting laws used to be and what they turned into because of this bill. And then I went through and I was looking at as much research as one can do, right? I'm looking at all the different candidates for all the different things we're voting for here in Georgia. And I found it interesting that several of the Republican candidates voted for SB 2 0 2 and I was like, Help me understand something.If you are certain there was no voter fraud in the state of Georgia in 2020, why do we need to pass a bill to secure voting ? I don't understand that. I'm trying to understand if you are say, I mean people are saying there was no fraud here. Brad. Brad, he was like, I will not overturn the election. I will not find you 11,000 votes cuz it's not true. Our elections are safe and secure. What he said in 2020, why do you need to pass a bill then to tighten up, to tighten up voting rights if there's no fraud? Because even though they were saying we, there's no fraud in Georgia, you still believe the lie that there was fraud in the election. And so part of what you did, Brian Kemp, and the power that he has held as governor is, yeah, he doesn't like me anymore. 45. Okay, that's fine, but I'm gonna pass a bill because I have the power to do that because I wanna make sure I get reelected. Even though I've said, even though I've said there was no fraud, Rod Rothenberger Secretary of State said there was no fraud in our election, but I'm gonna vote for that bill.And so it's again, it's that point that you made of the power that comes with stuff like that and the ability to cling to a lie or just blatantly lie and still win or still have progress forward or still be able to hold your seat . And again, that's very common in our country. I think it's embedded in the very foundation of this nation. And so again, it's not surprising, but again, I think that's the part of the historic part that people wanna overlook is it's still playing out today. You can say, I don't believe a lie, but actually believe a lie by that your actions that you take.Danielle (22:58):And I would even go so far as to say I don't actually think they don't know the truth. I think that's letting people off hook. And I think they know it's a lie and they're like, But the lie feels good to me.So the lie feels so good. And also I actually know my ass is on the line. If we do this legal, I may not get reelected. So I have to find a quote legal way, Votes for me, and to eliminate certain populations from the likelihood that they can vote. Of the things I think Tiffany Cross could highlight, would highlight around this season. And people did not want the spotlight on Georgia, on Seattle, on places where there's inequities. Arizona, I've already theories coming from my own family, I'm like, Lord, have mercy have to mute you. I think they don't wanna hear that. So now you just have sson, right?Alethea (24:04):Yep, yep. I mean that's what, at the end of the day, people, it sounds good initially, but the reality is when you keep talking about it and you keep doing it, it's like, Oh, you actually meant what you said in 2020 that actually mattered two years later, you're still talking about it. Oh, we thought that would pass. So it was a convenience. It makes us look good as a network. It makes us look good to hire someone like Tiffany Cross to bring on a joy read or Simone Sanders. I think about these black women who have been brought on in particular to talk about one, to talk about the reality in part of black people in our country, among other people people of color among other marginalized groups. So they're not just highlighting black people. We're gonna highlight the marginalized communities in our nation because not enough people, Tucker Carlson's not talking about that me.Kelly's not talking about that. They're not talking about that stuff on Fox News. They're not talking about some of those things even on a CNN or something. So because it will increase your viewership, it's a smart move from a business standpoint. It's a smart move. And we have to check our box and say, Look, we're more diverse. We're trying to diversify what we have on cable news. But then you keep talking about it and you keep talking about it and you're like, Wait a second, I don't know where we actually weren't ready for that . And we can't take the heat that comes with that. Because part of what Tiffany was doing in her candidness and her brashness was msnbc, from what I've read, was taking heat because of things that she was saying on air. And they didn't want her to do that. And so at the end of the day, you get to a point where you're like, Well, we don't either like that, or we can't handle the heat that's coming with that.So yeah, we'll let Fox News do whatever they wanna do, but here we're just not gonna do that. We can't handle it. So instead of continuing to work with her and navigate some of that even, I would say let her be who she is as a journalist, as an reporter, whatever spot she's filling and letting her be that and being able to sit in the tension of the heat that's coming with that. Because the reality is, that's part of what is, I feel like as a person of color in this nation is there's going to highlight being a part of a marginalized community. We're gonna highlight the things that people don't wanna see, that people don't wanna talk about, that people don't wanna hear about. Because one, especially, and I can say too in a marginalized group, but part of there's privilege. I also hold, it's uncomfortable , so it's uncomfortable for people.I wonder how uncomfortable it is. People are like, Oh, well there's a black woman that's president at msnbc, you guys are missing the point. It's not just about that , right? It's so much deeper than that. It's so much greater than that. But there's a part of it, it's like it makes me uncomfortable, so I don't wanna deal with my discomfort, so I just remove it. I ignore it. Right? I minimize it. And that's part of, I think what happened with Tiffany too is because of the things that she would talk about. I don't believe it's just in the way that she said it. I don't believe that at all. , right? That that's an excuse to defend a decision. But I think it's because of what she highlighted and what she represented in that space that people outside of MSNBC didn't like it. So then it required MSNBC to do something and they had a choice. We can keep her and deal with it and deal with the tension that comes with that, but we really care about who she's targeting. We want people to engage, We need to talk about this. Or we can do what other people do, other companies, other organizations, other businesses and say, Hey, it was cool for a year or two, but you gotta go. Right,Danielle (27:33):Right. And what's your sense there? She was gaining power. If she didn't have power, that would be no threat, let's say.There's complaints because there's power in her voice. And I think that experience likely, I know that experience, when you begin to use your voice and it carries some weight, then people are like, Oh, I actually didn't want that. Would say something and people will listen.Alethea (28:01):. Yeah. I don't think people realize that that's what comes with giving someone access to a space . And your motive isn't genuine or, and you have deceived yourself to thinking that it is right, or it was genuine, but you did not understand the layers of that or what would come with that. And then it got flipped really quick because you actually weren't ready for that. And so I don't think people realize when you have someone like a Tiffany Cross who's existing in a space where there's not a lot of black women existing, and the Billy for her to use her voice in the way that she does, people are gonna listen to her people. I didn't watch her show, I just don't watch cable news like that. But I've watched clips and things of that nature on social media and I'm like, Man, she got some fireShe got some fire. And as a black woman who I feel like it can engage similarly, I might not be as brash, but I'm candid. I feel like I'm pretty candid. I hold back at times depending on the context, but I feel like I've come more into myself over the last few years. People start listening to you and then the people who are in the power positions above you are like, Wait a second, what's happening?People actually like this. Oh, people are actually supporting her. So now, because you weren't ready for that, because you didn't think about that, and because Tiffany did start getting some power in that space because people were listening to her and people appreciated how she engaged with space, what she talked about, what she sent, what she made central. You have other journalists and reporters bringing heat on msnbc, and it's gonna be hot for a little while. Tiffany's not gonna go away. Someone else will pick her up and she's out. I saw this morning on Instagram, she's out doing her thing, helping people with voting, making sure people are getting out to vote. But when you've got a Latasha Brown founder of Black Widows Matter, a Jemele Hill, a Simone Sanders, a Joy Reed jumping in quick to say stuff, you're gonna feel that. And that's what comes with it.(30:13):When you wanna take that away because you weren't prepared for what that person would represent and what would come with that, that's the consequence of it. But to your point, she was gaining power. I think that cuz people listen to her , it makes sense though. She was reaching a group that wasn't being reached, at least on msnbc. So it makes sense. But if your viewership is up, that means people are engaging for a reason. , you don't just become the second most watch show and all of America if people don't actually care to hear what you have to say.Danielle (30:44):And I think that's the thing, people don't want that powerful group in America to have a voice . And so it's led folks like us or Tiffany to find alternative ways to communicateAnd to go around mainstream media. I mean, you know, think about this liberal organization, and I often think of Seattle when I think of that. It's very similar on the outside. It's like shiny. It's blue. It's like, we got you. And then my friend, this elder in the community was telling me when the clan split in Oregon, the guy that came up to Seattle said, Well now I can just take my hood off and put a suit on. And I was like, that's true, right? Because we have this area, and even in our county where the indigenous lands were taken a close friend of mine had a Japanese family here and their land was taken and they were deported to a camp. And then that land is worth millions of dollars on the water . So whose voices do we remove? What history has been removed? And Tiffany embodies that, right? Yep. You said as a platform. And she embodies so much of that. And she's one particular race from one particular world, majority people's group. And that is scary The truth that she can tell about Florida. I mean, I read it, I won't repeat it here, but I was like, I don't disagree.Alethea (32:16):Hey, the truth doesn't feel good sometimes, but truth is truth. So ,Danielle (32:20):Right? And sometimes I think I felt, when I read that, I was like, man, I wish I would've heard her say it. And I, I'll go back and find the clip just because I think it feels refreshing to hear someone on the other side be candid about all the BS that we have to invest . And I can understand why she was the most watched or second most watched.Alethea (32:42):So , yeah, she said things in a way that maybe validated people, but it was refreshing in a sense of that it was just different. And I think that's been part of it too. I think about some other, a joy read for example, different some differences in how she would communicate compared to Tiffany. But again, people tune in to Joy Reed, Simone Sanders got her own show. So you see again this the diversity of even the black women that represent those spaces. So I think in multiple contexts, it's very refreshing to hear people who are not prioritized, who are not heard from often, who look different and sound different. To hear them talk in a way where you're like, Dang, you said that on cable news.You're actually gonna call it what it is. You're not gonna shy away. I mean, Trevor Noah, I think about him, for example, on a daily show, there's a reason people enjoy watching Trevor Noah is because again, he's gonna talk about things and be honest and be candid about some of those things and say, I mean, this is true. This is what it is. So again, it's not a popular voice from certain people,Danielle (33:56):But let's be clear, she said some of these comments on a separate podcast, and then she was that part Tucker Carlson's out here spewing garbage every single day on the platform.Alethea (34:09):Yeah, I heard that from what I read, the story around MSNBC is that, yeah, that was, I guess the cherry on top that got her contract not renewed was what she's done a podcast separate. Again, people would say, Well, she's representing the network. I hear that. But what I really think it was, was that she did not shy away from saying stuff in response to people like Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly who would publicly bash her on their shows publicly. They took Tiffany's name and drug it through the mud every single time they could. And so what I think was my opinion is MSNBC didn't like, while Tiffany would engage in that. And part of me is again, hey, people that are being beat down the most in society, we see it happening. But please don't ruffle feathers. Don't say nothing. I understand. I've navigated spaces being in a predo, predominantly white context where I've been told to minimize parts of who I am and not show up fully as I am because the people in the room can't handle it.They don't know what to do with it. You're gonna be viewed a certain way if you X, Y, Z. And so I've minimized parts of who I am to try to be in those spaces without being able to fully be myself. But it's okay for in the predominantly white spaces for the white folks to say and do as they please . And I just gotta take it. Someone's touching my hair, I, I'm just supposed to take it is what I'm told, what I've been told. Well, I'm not gonna do that anymore and I'm not gonna deal with their discomfort. Don't touch my hair. That's part of my body. You didn't ask me something as minor yet. Very significant as an example again. And so I think it was because Tiffany wasn't willing to be used in that way and to be talked about in the ways that she was being talked about.So in her humanity as a human to say, I will not let you talk about me like that. So I am gonna respond to you and you're gonna keep talking about me and I'm gonna keep responding to you. And I know that you think you can just get away with it and do whatever you want. But I'm gonna keep saying it because I am here and I can say it. And I think that's part of MSNBC couldn't handle what was coming back from that because of how she was attacking or responding to other news anchors who were coming for her neck every chance they could get. Which is wild to me. Wild to me, defending her from my understanding, doing nothing, saying nothing, saying, Hey Tucker, chill homie. Stop saying that about Tiffany saying none of that. So you guys expected her to get on the second most watch show in America and not say anything in response to the stuff that's being said about her. Make it make sense.Danielle (36:50):Yeah. I always, I struggle so much with this idea on the small level and on the big level of the bully can do whatever, and you're never supposed to respond. That just for me, it's always a struggle. It's a struggle with how to teach my kids how to deal with it, especially when there's no one to go to that can help them out. It's a struggle with clients I see in a system that's gonna continue to bully them. And I see it here. I know some people are like, Well, you know, just gotta take it like you said. And then at what point are you like, Yo, this is abuse.This is not just like, oh, you know, suck. This is repeated bullying, repeated hard behavior towards someone that's abusive and slandering. And you're right. Where was msnbc? That's their job.Alethea (37:43):. If you don't want her to respond to that, then it's your responsibility to protect your employees . So, because for me, it's like Tiffany is a human before she is any, she's a news anchor before she's a journalist. Yeah. She embodies all of those things. But she is a human first and foremost. And so I'm not saying you get on a cable news show and you just be cussing people out. I'm not saying do that. Okay, lemme be clear about what I'm saying here is she should be able to respond to the vitriol that's being thrown her way, the racism and the misogyny that's being thrown her way, especially as a black woman in a space of journalism and reporting and a news anchor that that's not common. There's not a lot of women of color women, but then women of color in particular and then black women. And so you have to understand the dynamics that are at play there. And to expect her to show up every weekend and not say anything and you not do anything to protect her or have her back. I think they did her dirty. And at the same time I'm like, Tiffany, go somewhere else. Right?Cause you will get picked up. Go somewhere else where you will be supported, where you won't have to show up every weekend and defend yourself because the people that hired you and supposed to have your back. So go somewhere else, girl. Cause you won't get picked up. Go somewhere else.Danielle (39:14):Right? I mean, I don't wanna linger too long on this, but just to even bring up the point of the tack on Paul Pelosi, the kind of rhetoric from Tucker and these other pundits, it's actually violent. Yes. This is not just a racial slur, just anything. This is actually inspiring these nationalists to go and take physical action against other people. I mean, we're talking about mental distress and I'm not invalidating that. But this is physically dangerous for people. And so his attacks are actually inciting violence towards her body, not just that emotional, mentalBut there's the potential, and I'm sure the very real physical threat to her and to people like you and me who walk about and tell the truth. And so I do think that we have to stand for one another and it's important. Yes. Cause the threat is not just, I don't wanna say just, but it is mental emotional, but it also physical threat.Alethea (40:14):Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm so glad you named that too because again, the way of our society is right now, it doesn't take much. You have someone who literally said, You can't say that because I'm telling you, I don't tell the truth. And people are like, And we like watching you and we believe that you, and you just told us you lie. You have to do some crazy mental gymnastics to get to a point of believing someone who literally said, I don't tell the truth. That's wild to me. But because of the way our society is right now, where you're getting stuff, you're hearing so much from we have access to everything, all the sound bites, all the things. And so you're getting this constant leap fed in. And so yeah, Tiffany's having to navigate showing up at work every weekend and saying, Okay, here's what they said about me.Here's what I gotta respond to. Here's what I prep for. While I'm also trying to highlight what people of color in other marginalized communities are navigating in our political season. I gotta hold both. It's already distressing. Now I gotta hold both of these every weekend. And then because of the things that are being said, and we see the attack on Paul Pelosi knowing they were coming for Nancy Pelosi, what happened? They were going to kidnap the governor of Michigan. What? Gretchen Whitmer is that her name. Because of things that were said about her people said, Oh, we're gonna kidnap her. So now her physical body is in danger, right? Because people don't like, cuz she's liberal or progressive and so we need to take some physical action, not just demean her. Cuz it's not enough to do that. It's not enough to get on social media and say some really crazy things about people. We're actually gonna respond in a physical way. And we're seeing that all over when you tell a lie that there's voter fraud and people have believed this lie and internalized it like Georgia and Arizona and some of these other states, people cheated the election. The election was wrong. The results were wrong two years ago, . So you know what? We're actually gonna show up and threaten people at the polls. It happened in Arizona last week. Yep. I'm actually nervous about what it's been like in certain places of Georgia today because of the fear that is stoked by people like a Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly and others.There's so many other of them. But it turns into not just seeing your point, not just some emotional and mental distress, but it's a physical, I'm now feeling that in my body and I have to leave my job. I'm going to go vote in person because in Georgia it's really hard to vote with your mail in because of the rotor suppression bill. So now, now I really need to go in person. Cause I don't know if you actually get my vote if I mail it in. So now there's more potential harm to me as a black and brown person in the state to show up at the polls. Cause I have no idea what I'm gonna encounter. Because a bunch of people believe there was a lie from two years ago and they wanna incite violence to scare people. It's a whole nother layer. That's why we are, I love the work that you do.And what some of I've been learning over the last year or so is the body work. It's to be connected to our bodies. And I can only imagine what it's been like for Tiffany over the last year with what she's had to endure in a very public way. , you're the second most watched show on the weekend. It's a very public thing. And then you add in social media and all of those things. , I can only imagine what it's been like for her to leave MSNBC every day that she had to go there and just go about her day. Cuz people recognize her. People know her face, they know her voice. They know her name. So there's an added distress to that. We hold in our bodies as women, as people of color in this very crazy, violent society that we live inDanielle (43:58):That breath. I mean honestly. Right? I mean, think over the next weeks we're all gonna be holding our breath And for good reason. I mean, I think what's so telling about Tiffany is just that it could be any of us and it has been any of us in different systems in different places. And actually know that the truth is you don't actually have to be crass You don't have to be radical or far left. You can actually just say, Hey, I think Kitsap County has a racism problem. And people, No. Right. Just what you're talking about with voter suppression in Georgia, you can actually say something small people agree on For dominant culture. And then that can get you canceled or get you in or get you taken away from a position or power or you're an extremist or et cetera.Alethea (45:12):. Yep. That's actually why I wore my stay woke shirt today. Oh yeah, . Cause I, I knew we were gonna be recording, so I had to, even with that, I saw someone on Instagram, Jasmine Holmes the other day talked about how she gets labeled being so woke in her comment section or something when she's highlighting history. She's a history teacher, researcher. That's what she does. And she recite her sources all the things. But she's woke because she said, Hey, don't just listen to this black voice. Let me highlight all these other black voices that talked about slavery. But now I'm woke because I just gave you some history. So we joke there, some of the comments joking about how we take it as a compliment. Now. That's part of, I think what we do too, I think as people of color is we take the things and we have to turn it into some kind of joke or something like that. So we don't take the intensity of that with everything. Cause there's just so much of it. But yeah, it doesn't say, Man, that was racist. Gosh, you're so woke. I hope so. .Danielle (46:32):My night or whatever. So you feel like, what are your takeaways then around this time of year? Or what are the things you hold onto?Alethea (46:44):Good question. I think to answer what do I hold onto? I think for me it's part of it is my faith. My faith is what grounds me. My faith is also what puts me into action. And so when I think about the scriptures, when I think about Jesus embodied, right, walking this earth what did Jesus care about? The poor scriptures saw about the orphan, the poor, the widow, the oppress, the immigrant, the foreigner, the least of these, the poor, All of that's highlighted. And so for me, when I think about election season for me it's helpful as I'm thinking through who, who's running, More and more people are being educated around voting. So I think the more that people are being educated about policy, about what matters in your local and your state and federal, that more people are gonna start wanting to get engaged in policy politics for the good and for the bad.So mindful of that but because we're learning more and understanding more, for me, my faith should move me to action in a way that I am able to hold the complexity of a politician and to know that no one politician stands for. I feel like everything I have conviction around or what I may believe in. So if I hold that view, that means I'm not gonna vote, right? Because I'm gonna be conflicted about every person. And so for me, as I even just went to vote on Friday last day of really voting here in Georgia. I did my research and for me, man, I wanna vote in a way, am I voting in a way that's going to center those who do not hold privilege like I do. When I think about the people here in Georgia, myself included. And so am I voting in a way where I can say that person, I don't agree with Stacy Abrams on every matter.I don't cosign everything just cuz she's a black woman. We don't land in the same place in every way. But for me, with the things that she is going after and wanting to do as governor and the power that holds and who she's working for and her vision, I'm voting for her over Brian Kim . Cause I don't believe Brian Kim has the interest of those who are marginalized in our community. The second, there are two trauma centers in Atlanta. Atlanta Medical Center closed last, I think last week was last day. There's only one trauma center in Atlanta now Kim. And that one had been there forever. And this happened under Brian Kim, where the Atlanta Medical Center is in the old fourth ward. While it is gentrifying, because what city is not being gentrified right now, it's still that population. It was, it's an underserved, it's a lower income, predominantly black area.And that close, that served a significant population of people. Grady is downtown. So now people have to travel a bit further. And so I think about things like that. So Stacey is not perfect. I don't agree with her on every policy and position she holds. But Stacey, to me, I can say as I think about my faith in expressing that there are things that she is going after that I can get behind. And there are things that I can say, I don't agree with her and I can try to hold what does accountability look like? So I feel like for me, reminded that there's a long game here that I can't put all my faith or X one basket type of deal with who wins the election, who does it What does that mean for me? No matter who's elected, there's a responsive for me as a citizen, as a neighbor, as a friend as a follower of Jesus, what do I do tomorrow?What do I do on Thursday? What do I do on Friday? What do I do next week? What do I do in the next four years? Those things matter. So for me, I think for me, what do I hold onto to answer your question is did I do my homework, ? Did I do what I needed to do within my conscious and from where my faith grounding me? Did I act in a way that I can with clarity, say I feel really good about this decision and I can be really clear on don't, I'm not putting any of my value or worth in any political party because I really don't fit in either. And so that's been helpful for me the last few years to understand that. And so how do I live in a way where I vote and yet to say, and also say I don't agree with everything, but there's more here that I can align to than in other spaces.So again, I think for me, my faith is not in a politician or a party. And so I can have clarity around that and some freedom there. And then to know there's a responsibility for me after November 8th and make sure I do that. And I continue to live in that way. So for me is what I feel like I've learned over the last few years in election seasons. There's been so many. I feel like 20 18, 20 20 and 2022. It's like this two year cycle of intense 16, 16, 18, 20 22. This intensity of elections every two years. So I feel like I've learned quite a bit over. I'm a different, I feel like I engage it differently six years later than I did in 2016. Cause there was just so much I didn't know six years ago. And what I put my hope in, what I put my faith in, I feel like it has shifted immensely.And so I engage my civic duty. I posted this morning, I got to meet Mr. George Sally, he's 93 years old. I got to meet him in Selma Montgomery where we were together after our trip in August. And I posted about that this morning on my Instagram. And I said, on election day, I'm reminded of courageous people like George Sally who survived bloody Sunday and March 50 plus miles so that I could live out my right as a citizen and my engage, my civic duty and the privilege I have to vote. I recognize that. And so for me, that's also what I hold onto is as a black woman, I carry a responsibility that my ancestors so many did not get to do when they should have. They had every right as a citizen to vote. And they were not allowed to do that. And while that same is under attack, I still have more access and ability to vote that they did not have that George Sally didn't have in the sixties that he was fighting for.And so for me, I also carry that with me, is to say it matters today, but it matters cuz of who those came before me. And I wanna honor, I honor that. I wanna honor Mr. George Sally, I wanna honor John Lewis from Atlanta. I wanna honor Afeni Lou Hamer. I wanna honor Shirley Chisholm. I wanna honor the black women and black men that are not named that I will never know, but who died trying to exercise their right to vote even in this very state. And so I hold onto that as well. That matters to me immensely. To not minimize that or overlook that in this time. And to know what they were fighting for granted me a right that I should have had. So I need to carry that legacy and say, what is it that I'm gonna continue to fight for so that when I look back, people look back at whatever amount of years, whether my name or not, I'm a part of that continued legacy of fighting for rights that we should have as citizens and just as people. Mm-hmm. ,Danielle (54:13):As I listen, I'm just aware of the way you have a gift of seeing people and their stories and the gift that you have to step in with truth and with honor for your ancestors and the work you're called to do now. And so I'm guessing that that's part of what you're doing with D Ei B . Like I wonder if you can own the B And I feel that in your communication, maybe you don't have the research of the technical term of it, but it is something I experience of you as a person and even in this conversation How do people find you? How do they find your work? How do they know what you're up to? I know you have your own podcast. I've listened to it.Alethea (55:00):. Yeah. Well first Danielle, thanks for Yeah, yeah, thanks. What you just said, that's very meaningful to me and I hold that and I appreciate that a lot. I think it's really important to name things for people that we may not see in ourselves or that I tend to overlook. So I appreciate you. Yeah, just naming that. So thank you. Yeah. I on You can find me on Instagram. I am not on Twitter for good reason now, but I haven't been on Twitter. I haven't been active on Twitter in a year. I took a break when I was on sabbatical last summer, and then when I tiptoed back in I was like, Oh, I don't wanna be here. And so I just deactivated my account though with the new Elon Musk take over and the crap show I'll say. But that has been so, I was like, I don't even want anything represented.So I am no longer on Twitter. I love Twitter, but Twitter is too crazy right now. And I value my piece. So I'm on Instagram Leaf 14 l E A t h 14. That's my IG handle. You can find me on there. That's really where I occupy on social media. I have a TikTok, but I don't post anything public. It's all private. And then I share it from there, . So yeah, you can find me there. And then, yeah Danielle, you just said I cohost a podcast. It's called The Roll Down. It is on, I think, so many different, It's on Apple, Spotify. I didn't even know this, but it's on Google Podcast too. Not many people listen on there, but you can. Yeah, Apple and Spotify, it's there. Season one, we had 18 episodes. I co-host out with Matthew Melindres, one of my dear friends.The roll down we say is a space where people of color to be known and seen and guidance for those in the pursuit of justice. And we are finally, after a long delay we are getting going with recording for season two. So be on the lookout for that. Subscribe, download, all the things. We really appreciate it. The podcast has been such a gift for Matthew and I in ways that we did not anticipate and super encouraging. So we, we've gotten the texts or dms. When are y'all coming back? When are y'all coming back? When can we expect season two? So it's coming, coming finally. I actually have things on my calendar this week to record. So yeah, the roll down podcast, you can find me there too. But yeah, feel free to dme. I like engaging with people. So yeah, y'all can hit me up, but that's where I'm atDanielle (57:28):This person list. I'm like, I want Alicia in my space working with my community, my business. You're doing DEI work. So is that possible through Instagram or is there an email that people should reach out to you for?Alethea (57:41):Yeah, I would say right now just DME on Instagram. That way I can yeah, connect that way. Yeah, because of where I left, I have more freedom to engage in the work that I feel called to do. And so I can doke some contract work, things of that nature. Consulting is something I feel like I'm really gifted at and I love helping people see things that they don't see and move forward in a better way. And to really understand how do you understand yourself as a person and then as a leader. So if you're an individual wanting some stuff or if you're a team, you lead a team and you're just trying like, how do I love my team better? How do I engage these conversations in a way that's meaningful? A lot of DEI work. There's actually a book that just came out today d e I deconstructed that I'm really excited to get to read.I saw her on LinkedIn. Lily Zang I think is, I might be, I probably mispronouncing her last name. Z H E N G I believe. But she is a DEI consultant. She talks about how a lot of DEI work, people don't realize it, significance of it, and they're actually not ready for a lot of what they say they want. And so stuff falls through or they aim for something. And so for me as a consultant, I wanna say, what's, what are you trying to achieve and how do we get there? And then actually follow up and coach people along the way. I love coaching people too. So yes, hire me. I love this type of work. Got some credentials and I'm getting some more and just continue. I think I feel equipped in what I'm doing too. So yeah, hit me up on Instagram and yeah, we can go from there.

Akuyea Karen Vargas: source (https://www.tidelandmag.com/articles/2022-03-a-warrior-for-peace)(photo credit:  Nora Phillips)"Vargas may be small in stature, but the 59-year-old mother of three is a towering presence in the West Sound's African American community. An army veteran, community activist, arts educator, youth mentor and historian, she has been a tireless advocate for the young and underserved, and for healing racial divisions in our communities for over 25 years.After growing up on the East Coast and serving in the Army, Vargas arrived here in 1992 when her husband was assigned by the Navy to the Bangor submarine base. Raising her three Black children in the overwhelmingly white Bainbridge schools was a rude awakening, Vargas recalls. Advocating for her own children in the school system led her to start advocating for other children of color. Eventually she joined the district's Multicultural Advisory Committee, which she co-chairs to this day.Through two programs she founded in 2003, the Living Arts Cultural Heritage Project and Living Life Leadership, Vargas has taught cultural history and life skills to hundreds of youth throughout Kitsap County, including many of the young leaders who spoke at those demonstrations in 2020.Recognizing her contributions, Governor Jay Inslee bestowed Vargas a 2021 Governor's Arts and Heritage Award in the new category of Luminaries, honoring people who “stood as shining lights for their community during the pandemic.” Commenting on the award, Sheila Hughes, executive director of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, described Vargas as “a trusted advisor… as well as a great friend who has a genuine laugh and a huge hug just when you need one.”Multicultural Advisory Committee Living Arts Cultural Heritage Project and Living Life Leadership2021 Governor's Arts and Heritage AwardDanielle (00:35):Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on race, faith, justice, gender and healing. And as many of you know or aware, I mean it's election season. It's election day. And whether we're voting today, we already voted. Maybe some of us cannot vote for various reasons in our communities. This is an important time in the nation and it has been an important time for many years. I think back to 20 16, 20 18, 20 20. And now we're in 2022 and we're still working through what does it mean to exercise this right to vote? What does it mean? What is impacting our communities? What things are important? And today I had a Coyier, Karen Vargas of Kitsap County. She is an elder. She is on the Multicultural Advisory Committee for our county. She is living arts cultural heritage, founded the Living Arts Cultural Heritage Project and Living Life Leadership. She has taught cultural history and life skills to hundreds of youth throughout Kitsap County and including many of the young leaders who spoke at demonstrations in 2020. Ms. Vargas is concerned about the impact of what Covid did. She is deeply invested. And in 2021, the governor of Washington, Jay Insley, bestowed on Vargas an arts and heritage award in the category of luminaries honoring people who stood as shining lights for their community during the pandemic. And someone that commented on the award, Sheila Hughes, the executive director of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, described Vargas as a trusted advisor as well as a great friend who has a genuine laugh and a huge hug for just when you need one. So as you think about listening tune in and hopefully keep an open mind to the conversation. So it's just an honor to join forces Akuyea (02:51):, what we need to be doing. We have done tremendous work together for many years back from the Civil Rights Movement and even before we were working in a collective collaborative way to address the issues that affect all of our communities. And so the more we can do that, the more we can cultivate that, I think we can begin to do some impactful work that will move things forward. Danielle (03:24):And I love the way we got connected. It happened at church. Yeah, I saw you at a couple events before that, but then you were speaking to church and I saw the post on Instagram. I was like, I told my family we're going to church today, I know. So we showed up and we made this connection around youth and mental health. Would you be able to speak to that a little bit? Akuyea (03:50):Yes. Our children are not doing well, let's just start there. Our children are having a difficult time. They're dealing with trauma, they're dealing with depression, they're dealing with anxieties, just dealing with life and they don't know how or what to do. In 2019, I had one of my living life leadership students take her own life and it devastated me the way she did it. She ran in the middle of a highway, sat down and allowed car to run over her. And what I still mean, the actual act devastated our students, our parents, her friends, the school. And we have to address some of the issues because we knew before that time that she was struggling with her mental health and with depression and all these things. And so what do we do when we, when actually know we are aware that our students have social and emotional stuff and trauma and stuff? Pauses. Because she was struggling with her meds too. She said those medications made her feel all wacky And then she was telling me some of the medication that she said would cause depression. I said, Well, why you on medication? It's gonna cause depression or anxiety. And so we need to have a conversation. We need to be talking about it. And we need to be talking about it from multiple issues, not just with the parents or the students or with the schools, but for the health and wellbeing of that young person. Should we be prescribing all this medication? They don't know the chemical imbalances. I'm not sure. That's not my field . But to be able to help them to process some of all of this , we really need to be talking more about the mental health of our young people. We have to do it. Danielle (06:43):I mean, first I'm stunned and not stunned because death of young, of the young is always shocking. And I'm aware that it's also I'm angry and sad that also it is not surprising. And I think you named the year as 2019. So this was even before a pandemic. Akuyea (07:12):Before the pandemic. So I know that we were dealing with this way before the pandemic. And only God can tell you The depth of all of that during and even now the results of the pandemic in the state of our young people's health, mental health, especially their mental health. Danielle (07:40):I think one thing that struck me when I spoke to you after that church service was the fact that I began to tell you stories of my own children at school. And you were like, I got into advocacy because of my kids. And it's not that I wasn't paying attention before I had kids experiencing it, but it becomes heightened alert, heightened awareness, and just even watching the depression cycle through my own family cycle, through my friend's kids on multiple levels. I mean from depression to anxiety to suicidal ideation to self harm, to just the lack of ability to pay attention or find interest like you described the hopelessness. And so just the heightened awareness. And then we were talking about schools and this and we are now post 2020, George Floyd, the murder of George Floyd by police, the multiple other lynchings that happened in that year. And we're back. We're actually talking on election day and the impact this has on students of color and their mental and frankly white bodied students too. This is not just a one section of society's problem, this is a larger issue. Akuyea (09:05):And the role of social media plays in their isolation and just being focused on what I call the device and not engaging and not having those healthy social skills and not being able to sit down in a room and just have a conversation. Being in rooms plenty enough time that our students are talking to one another, sitting right next to one another. And that's about, they don't want us to know what they're talking about. I know what that's about too. Let's not play. We don't know what that's about too. But when you ask them to sit down and just let's talk, they act like they don't do it. They don't know what to do. . And I think we are losing how to engage personally and how to have healthy relationships personally. One, we were doing some conflict. I can remember we were doing some conflict resolution and someone had advised, and I won't say the name, someone had advised, Well let's do this on Zoom. I said, Wait, wait, wait. , you know, can be brave at a distance, but you need to come into a circle . And you need to be able to look the individual in their eye. . You need to be able to see their body language and to be able to feel what's happening in the environment. . I said there are elements that when you are moving to do conflict resolution or healing and peacemaking, that that's done in a , intimate in an environment where those can come together. . And I understand Zoom has been a good tool in everything , but I also know social media and zoom, give your balls that you don't have when you sitting in front of somebody and you got to be accountable for some harm that you have done. , you feel safe because you know what, You can say what you want to say and you can do all of that. Because you know what? I'm just on a zoom , I'm over here , I can be brave over here. Could you stand before the individual and confront some mess that go down But if we're going to get to a place of healing and reconciliation, you have to be able to step into that Because the bottom line, if I got conflict with you and you got conflict with me and we can say all we can be on social media calling each other, boom, bam, bam, bam, bam. When, and this happened with some of our students too. , when they confronted each other, one of them stabbed the other one to death. Now all of that hostility was allowed over the social media to be able to do all that. Building up, texting. I'm coming over, I'm gonna kick your tail. And Danielle (13:19):I think you bring up something that I'm thinking about Aku, which is not only do we need to, we can't intervene on our students behalf unless we as caregivers, parents, community members, adults in the community are willing to do the work first. Gonna smell it a mile away. Yes. They're gonna know if we haven't done the work ourselves. AKuyea (13:46):Let tell you about our young people. They are the best hustlers learners. And they, they're watching us And they say, Oh yeah, they ain't about it. They ain't about it now. In fact, they're learning from us We are their first teachers. . They know when we talk trash and they sitting over here. That's why all of this stuff is coming up in our schools. You've got all of these racist ideologies coming out. The students are listening to their parents in their home talking yang yang and saying, Oh no, we ain't doing this. Yeah. Them negros in, Oh this, that, all of that racists ideology at home. And when the students, they're ear hustling, they say, Oh no, my parents, no. And giving them the green light, they come to school and guess what? They feel em bolded and empowered to say and do what they want. Because guess what? Those parents have modeled it for 'em and modeled it for them very well. . And they feel like they can say what they want. Their parents got their back Even the teachers come to school with racist ideologies, . And it pours out on students of color. When you got staff and teachers calling students the N word and it's okay, going on, something's very wrong with that picture . But yet here we find ourselves in 2022 So we've got all kinds of dynamics happening, but popping off in the schools Danielle (15:51):So we can't be people as community members, adults, people that wanna see change in progress from whatever lens you're coming from. We cannot be people that say, Hey, let's have peace. If we're not gonna be willing to have that conversation in our own homes, Because our kids will go into schools which they are doing and they will enact what we're doing in our private lives. They'll continue to perpetuate it. So we have to be people about what we do in our private lives is what we do. What privately happens is publicly is publicly congruent. Akuyea (16:34):Oh, I'm glad you said that. Because what's done in the dark will come to life. Danielle (16:39):It will. Akuyea (16:40):And it does. And it manifests itself. We look at the attitude and the behavior and the character of our young people . And we're saying, Okay we're dealing with some stuff. And I hear me say this, I pray and I commend our teachers. Our teachers have to deal with whole lot of stuff . But when they were looking at the condition of the learning environment in our schools and they understood that they had to train their teachers with having trauma, they have to train the teachers to look at diversity, equity, and inclusion. They have to teach our kids. So when they started introducing social emotional learning, I said that was social, emotional and cultural learning. Why in the world did you take off culture? Culture is an ideology as well. . You bringing in these cultural elements and cultural, what I said, behaviors, It's not all just about, They said, Oh no, we don't wanna, That's a race. I said, No . What culture we have in our schools. The culture that we have in our school is very unhealthy. That's an unhealthy culture. . And what are the cultures that are manifesting in our schools? There's a culture of what I would call hatred going on in our school. . Oh, culture of bullying. They did a whole thing for years of bullying. Well, what culture were you deal. You have a culture of unhealthy behavior and bullying going on in your school. They always get all squeamish and fear all culture that has just to do with race. And I come from a culture and you come from a culture and everyone that steps themselves into those environments come from a culture Danielle (19:17):I love what you're saying because don't get me wrong. I wanna do this work of anti-racism. Yes. I learned from the president of my grad school Dr. Derek McNeil. He said, Anti-racism is enough for us to say, Hey, stop that. Stop the harm. But where we find healing is within our cultures, In our cultures. You got Mexican culture, you got Irish, you got I'm You got African culture, there's a lot of cultures we could be learning from to bring healing. If we change and we try to operate under the social Akuyea (19:54):That's right. Because think it European Western culture here in this United States. Danielle (20:01):And if we operate under the idea that no, it's just a melting pot or we're just whitewashed, we miss the particularities that cultures can bring us that also don't bring harm. They also bring healing. Akuyea (20:14):One of, you know what, I'm glad you said that. It's not a melting pot. The United States is not. One of the things that Bishop Lawrence Ray Robinson taught us is that we are a salad bowl. We come in with distinctive things within that salad. The onion is the onion. It doesn't lose itself in there. The tomato is the tomato. The lettuce is the lettuce. The broccoli, if you wanted to throw it in there, is broccoli. You know what I'm saying? How I'm the peppers are the peppers, the olives are the olives. Very distinctive. But they come together to have a beautiful, wonderful salad . And each of them bring a distinctive flavor to that salad bowl. . Now when we think of a melting, we're talking about what are we a melting pot? What does that even mean? ? We haven't even examined our own terminology and our own languaging. That can be very confusing. Cause a melting pot means everybody gotta assimilate in that pot. Danielle (21:35):. So I think about this and I think it comes back to our young people. They're smart enough to know what we've been doing isn't working and they're also picking up on what we're leading by example in They're doing the same as us or they're trying to do something different. But I think what you and I were talking about, we need some other frameworks here. This is a crisis. Oh Some action steps. Let's have some frameworks for our community because we are not trying to have a school shooting here. Right? Danielle (22:14):We are ripe. And that is very alarming. We hear about all of these school shootings and atrocities that's happening across our nation and all of these things that are popping off and other countries and everything. But honey, this Kitsap County, I have always said, let us do some intervention and prevention because we don't wanna be on the national news for the atrocities that could be committed in our community. And I can say this, we are no better than any other community. And it can happen here. It can happen Anywhere else. . And that's real because guess what the signs are telling , What is popping up and manifesting in our communities is telling and the unhealthy behavior and activities that have been manifesting is really alarming. And we should be paying attention. And our community is only gonna be as healthy as we are and we're not. Speaker 2 (23:33):Right. There's a high level of depression, a high level of anxiety high level of despair across our adult communities in the area. There's a great Danielle (23:48):There's a great amount of actually division in our community. And I don't think that that division is necessarily wrong. Now listen to me because It tells you where you're at If you say, Oh, we're so divided, let's just come together. I have to say, Wait a minute, let's find out why we're divided. Maybe there's some good reasons. And once we know the reasons, then there's opportunity to tell a more true story about Kitsap County. And through the true story, hopefully we can move towards some reconciliation and understanding. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's gonna benefit our youth. So I don't think it's like, Oh, just throw your kids in mental health therapy. No, you need to be doing the work too. Akuyea (24:38):Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you said that because one of the things that I've been just kind of thinking of is, what does that even look like? What does truth and reconciliation even look like? And I said, Well, you can't get there if you're not willing to acknowledge The history, acknowledge the culture that's here in our county that has been prevalent here for hundreds of years. Kensett County is a very racist county. Very. If you're not willing to say that, that's a problem. If you're not willing to look at that history here, cross-bar, even lynchings even, you better understand when we talking about the history, the taking of land, all of that. If we go back just to the late 18 hundreds early In this county, we would better know how to move equity forward in our community. But because we're not willing, Oh, everything's tucked under the rug and things that have happened, Oh, those things have been erased. . I can remember that back when I first got here in the nineties, it was a lot of work going on with Raymond Reyes and with Jean Medina and Theor. There was a lot of racist behavior with a lot of ill behavior a lot of what I would call racist ideologies in our school districts at the North end that was manifest. But it was at the south end too. It was in the Mason counties. It was all over. But we were dealing with it here at the north end, the SaaS drive and kids at school district, the Banbridge Island School District they were coming together cuz they had to deal with all the stuff that was popping off in the schools. . And I can remember they formulated common threads and once Jean Medina retired, it was like all those years of work just went away. Bam. And it came straight back. What did that say to me is that racism was alive and well and has always been alive and well in Kitsap County, . And if we're not intentionally addressing it and calling it out, it will continue to manifest and grow. We have to begin to hold the schools and our community accountable for the behavior that, because otherwise what I see is you just give them a green light. You give these young people a mind that okay behavior that that's acceptable. Oh, I can go to school and say, Oh, because that's the culture that breeds here. Danielle (28:19):Right? I mean, you reminded me of some of the history. I actually have a friend who grew up as a child in this area on La Molo on the waterfront, a Japanese American family. They were removed from their house prime property and they were deported to a internment camp and they lost their land right on the Molo. And now when I drive by that piece of property, it's worth millions of dollars. Akuyea (28:50):All I'm saying, right, The removal. And she's not the only one. The removal of native individuals off their own lands, And not, let me say it like this. In the 1920s, they held one of the largest in Seattle. They held a lot of their meetings right here on Bay Bridge Island on Pleasant Beach Back in 1992. When I got here, they were all up in the uproar talking about why did the clan target island? Well it wasn't until I did research later that I found out the history. They have strongholds here. They have headquarters camps all over Kitsap County, . If you do look at Chuck's report, he works with the Human Rights Council. He has done research about the entire region here and the headquarters and where white supremacists and Klan members and all of them set up their headquarters and kids that . So we need to understand the history that has thrived here for over a hundred years , and understand that that culture is alive and well. in Kitsap County, Danielle (30:46):Cause if we tell a false history, we can't actually heal the wound. Akuyea (30:50):It won't be able to. You gotta know your history, good, bad, and ugly. You got to know your history. And let me say this, there are regions that have deep history. If you go down to Mississippi and Alabama, Oh those are strong holes. , Virginia. And guess what? This northwest got stronghold too. . And we act like, oh no, not here, But that's a false narrative. when they left the south back after slavery, they came here to formulate a new frontier. A new frontier in Oregon and in Seattle in this north, deep roots in this northwest. And if we don't even know that history, we are just, we're fooling ourselves into thinking, Oh no, not here. Not in the northwest. We're not like Alabama. I said, But after the Civil War, they came and set up roots here. Strong roots, You don't think so. You better check your history. Danielle (32:30):And I think we can be lulled to sleep because people will say, Well you got a democratic governor and you got a Democratic senator and you vote unquote blue. But we both know that being blue doesn't mean you're telling something true. Akuyea (32:48):Honey, let me tell you what one of the Klan masters said he was taking off his, when he left, it was a split in Oregon. And when he left Oregon and came to Seattle, he said he was taking off his hood and he was putting on a suit He went and got those jobs, started setting policy, started working in government, law enforcement all over. So don't think just because they don't have the hood that they're still not working in those ideologies. Danielle (33:36):, I mean as you've named in Kitsap County, the idea of manifest destiny has been repeated over and over. And we see it in some of the ways that even the county commissioners have ran and used. I'm thinking of one county commissioner that owns land that therefore wants to create housing resource. And the danger of that. And Danielle (34:05):If you don't think it's entrenched and institutionalized, you better think again. If you don't think it's in our systems, you better think again because those systems were created by those individuals. We have to understand the legacy of that as well. , we've got a lot of work to do. I, I can tell you, I don't know everything, but I'm sure willing to research and learn Oh no. We never move out of hopelessness. We are people of hope. We are as human beings. We are people of hope. We always hope for the better. We hope for the son to shine. We hope that we have a good dinner tonight. We are steeped in hopefulness . And for us to operate out of hopelessness is, we ought not to even perpetuate that Because hope is in our dna. is part of our being. You hope your children will do well. you hope you find a good husband. you hope you find someone that can love you the way you wanna be loved. No, we, that's in our DNA to be hopeful, . And when we start being hopeless or working hopelessness, what happens is we start to decline depression and all these other things begin to come into our lives. And oh, it filled with anxiety. When you remove hope from someone's life, then you know what they spiral to that place that they commit self-harming and harm others as well. So no, we don't wanna move outta hopelessness . And we wanna talk about that need. You have to empower our young people to understand we don't move in hopelessness, I even tell a kid, you hope you get an ice cream. Oh yeah, they want that. Yeah, , we can build hope, we can cultivate that. We can begin to push back on hopelessness Danielle (37:05):And I think the way we do that is, it's this funny thing. If you're from a dominant culture and your culture wins by not telling a true story . And it can feel that if you tell the true story or what's behind the curtain, that you will be plunged into despair. And let me say this, you should grieve and be sad and be angry at that history behind the curtain. That is not bad for you. It is And then that will enable you to take small steps to help your young person with a white body Be able to learn to hold history and hold making change. Akuyea (37:52):And what when we continue to perpetuate lies and perpetuate harmful history, we have to do some self examination going on with us that we wanna keep holding this harmful history in place here. What? What's going on with us as human beings that we would want to perpetuate harm on any individual because they're different than I am. They come from somewhere a different, they have a different culture. They talk different . Why do we always go to that place? Danielle (38:56):I think we can learn so much from what happened in different places in the world and how they subject and no one's done it perfectly. Cuz there's not a perfect way to do it. It's messy. But I think of my friend from Germany who's talked about learning about the Holocaust and her family's involvement in the Nazi regime. Family has worked with their own shame and worked to change their attitude towards the Jewish peoples there in Germany and the fighting of that nationalism. And then I think of the conflict in Rwanda and how yes, now be currently neighbors with someone where hoot season and Tutsis that they were formerly enemies. Blood enemies. So it's not that this hasn't been done, but in both those spaces you see that there's memorials to the harm that was done in Germany. Akuyea (39:53):That's exactly right. That's exactly right. They moved. And that's important. They move their nation into addressing the harms that had been perpetuated and those atrocities that had been done. And they had to move their entire nation and the globe into acknowledging and moving those families into a place of healing And that work that was deep work But we've not done that deep work here. Danielle (40:35):No, we haven't. And then we see our young people in despair and acting out the same fights. And then we have the gall to say, Well what's wrong with you Akuyea (40:51):Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And we've gotta take a pause and look at ourselves because we've gotta examine ourselves in this . We can't point fingers. We have to begin to be accountable for the harms that we have done here in our own country. , we wanna always say, Oh well that was Germany and oh that was Africa. That was over in Asia. What about what happened on this soil? You exterminated the entire indigenous population. . There are tribes we'll never see again. Think about that. And have we even addressed those atrocities, All of the souls that was lost during the trans-Atlantic slave trade that didn't even reach the shores. And if the sea could give up her dead, she could tell a story. But yet we don't wanna step into that harmful history. We don't wanna acknowledge that harmful history. We don't wanna talk about, Oh, don't teach my child how in school this critical race theory thing. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't dig that up. Don't bring that up And I said, Well what's the pushback on telling whole history Danielle (43:02):And I think from a Latino Latinx perspective, there has to be the acknowledgement of the anti-blackness in our culture.Affects our sisters and brothers in the communities of color outside of us. I hate from Latinos. And what's interesting, all those mixtures are part of what makes a Latino Akuyea (43:31):Thank you. That's why I said, Oh, we have to understand we're where we come from our history. Cause that's where the work begins. Danielle (43:41):And then the xenophobia Cultivated. And I think what is important about knowing this history for me, because then I have to say, and I'm Oh, I'm gonna die in shame. I'm some shame. But it's a way for me to say, how do I build connection with you then Akuyea (44:03):I wish Carrie was on here because we work with our equity sisters and we've worked with our Kitsap race and for a whole year we were doing aging our voices and speaking truth together with our Kitsap serves. Those Europeans showing up for racial justice and all of us. And coming together, it was the coming together to be able to talk about some hard things and for them to be able to hear and for us to be able to hear, for us to be able to share our experiences and our voices and be able to put it down and be able for them to say, I'm feeling like Harry would say, Am I in denial here? Is this implicit? Buy it, what's going on? But to do that self, that type of self evaluation and be able to stay in that space when it was very uncomfortable, to deal with some hard history And so those are transformational, engaging opportunities and experiences that we've got to bring to the table. That's real truth and reconciliation, . That's the layer of foundation to be able to move forward and be able to heal and be able to reconcile and talk about how we gonna reconcile it. What will we do? How will we begin to build a healthy way of engaging with one another and build in a relationship. Now the relationship might not be tight. I might not be come away being old lovey dovey fu fu fu. But understanding one another and being able to speak peacefully to one another. being able to say, You know what? I agree or I don't agree. And stay in that space where we can work through some of the challenges that we have and some of the difference of opinions and ideals we have between one another. Danielle (46:29):And I think our kids are just waiting for us to pass these tools to them. My daughter was part of a meeting and part of what happened with my daughter who's Mexican, is that she heard a classmate called the N word and then spoke up about it and then was sharing that story. And then one of the Latino students was talking about , how another Latino student was talking about being told to go across the border. And my daughter shared that the African American student presence said, I don't want that to be like that for you. That doesn't happen to me. I wish I knew so I could say something before they got there faster than I've gotten there. Akuyea (47:13):But you know what? And I can say this, and this is not taking away back to where you came from. This ain't your country. And I'm like, how did we be an enslaved and brought here in chains? You be able to say, you need to go back to where you come from. I didn't come here , many came. But most of the Africans that are enslaved to these Americas, they come here on their own He knows, he knows. And we have to talk. I mean for us to sit here, whether we're black, white, Asian, Pacific Islanders or Dominicans or Puertoricans or we have a understanding of who we are, Where we come from, our ancestral history, history of our parents and their parents and their parents parents, . We carry all of that in our dna We understand in a way that we should be able to have some healthy conversations and not feel bad about who we are. But many of our children have been forced into force assimilation in this nation. , they got to lose who they are in assimilate to be accepted, which very unhealthy they made the native students, you either assimilate or exterminate And the same thing with a lot of the enslaved Africans that they brought here. I don't call myself a African American. I come from an enslaved people brought to a stolen land. An enslaved to this America. I'm African I'm an African woman who's ancestors were stolen and enslaved to these lands. They've gone over, What do you wanna call yourself? I call myself black. I'm black. Danielle (50:18):As we're wrapping up here, how do folks are at listening? It's voting day. We have all the charge of the events. I think people are gonna hear the passion in our voices today. I wonder in Kitsap County, how can folks connect to you? How can I think, I wanna encourage us to have more of these restorative circles. How can they get in touch with you? How can they support what we are trying to do in this community? Akuyea (50:52):Yes. Well, you can always get in contact with the work with Kitsap Erase coalition, with the work that we do in our schools with our multicultural advisory council, with Living life leadership, with the Living Arts Cultural Heritage Project. I mean, I'm accessible in our community. I try to make myself available for our parents, for our students, for community members. We like to work in coalition . We understand that we can work in silos and we can work alone in our agencies and our stuff. But I'm more concerned about the collective collaborative work that it will take all of us to do to transform our communities . We have to be able to learn how to work together with one another as human beings. So yes, if you go on Kitsap e Race coalition, you'll be able to connect with the coalition because we want us to be able to cultivate working together. On. No, you ok girl. . No, we wanna be able to work together and if we got is let's talk about our issues and together and see how we can have a healthy relationship with one another. Danielle (52:35):We are one place, but this is the work we need to be doing across in small conversations like this across our country, which can lead. Akuyea (53:11):That's right, that's right. And hear me say this, we have a unique opportunity to model something not just for our children, our families, our community members, our schools. We have the unique opportunity to model for a nation how to do the work in your own community to bring about change. Danielle (53:37):We do have that opportunity. Akuyea (53:40):And to me, that's inspiring to me. That's what gets my juices up and flowing in the morning. 

Misty Harper-Anderson is someone who values deep connection and authenticity inrelationships. She has led in various faith spaces for the past eight years after spendingthe first part of her vocational life in the corporate world. She is a visionary leader whoappreciates the power of collaboration. Misty is the Senior Director of Event Management for Pulse (https://pulse.org). Additionally, she serves as the Lead and Planting Pastor for Aspen Community Church. Misty and her husband, Bill, live in Eagan. Even though their children are all adults, atleast technically, they spend a lot of time together. Their oldest daughter, Sydney,married a great man, Ludwig, in 2020. Their son, Jacob, lives in Alabama and loves thesouth. Their youngest daughter, London, is now at MNSU Mankato. So, they areexperiencing the empty nest for the first time. This is a family who loves board games,hiking and traveling togetherDanielle (00:18):Hey, welcome to theArise podcast, Conversations on faith, race, justice, gender and healing. And the guest on the podcast is just a dear friend today, Misty Harper Anderson. First of all, you're gonna hear me say that I have a room in her house. I've stayed in the same room twice, and I have, uh, my own drinks in there, LaCroix my own flavor, Misty Ann is truly the embodiment of hospitality, someone I trust, uh, who's willing to have difficult conversations. Someone who's been in the liminal space before and has persisted in that space. She's an event planner, um, a pastor, a church planter, and someone that's hung onto her faith in very authentic in real ways. Love to hear where you're at, what you're doing. Any recent changes you're willing to share. I, I love you. Respect you. I've been in your house. I have my own room there. Um, yeah, , and I've been wanting to get you on the podcast for a long time. I know we collaborated on a writing project a while backElection. And I think after that experience, I was just knocked out. I've written here and there since then, but, you know, it was like a lot of emotional experience for all of us. So yeah, tell me what are you comfortable sharing about what you're doing? I know you have some exciting things going on, so I'd love to hear about them.Misty (01:36):Yeah, for sure. Well, first know this, you still have a room here. It still has your LaCroix water in it, and there were some m and m's there now safely in like a, a jar that's tightly sealed. So whenever you come back, they are waiting for you in your room. Uh, what I'm doing right now, so many things. So, so many things. Um, I, I just accepted a full-time job and, uh, I am really excited about the, the title of, of the position as Senior Senior Director of Event Management. So really it's going to be logistics behind these really large evangelism events. And, uh, I love nuts and bolts and things. I love spreadsheets. That's like one of the nerdy things about me. I love color coded spreadsheets. Uh, so that's new that will start this coming Monday. So in just a couple of days.And in addition to that, I am doing event management for our friend Joe Saxton and, and Steph O'Brien. And that, that part of my work will wrap up probably like the end of November. Uh, and that's been very fun. You know, I have such great love and respect for both of them, and I love AZA is their event, and I love that. And just everything that they represent in this world and how they uplift and encourage women. So it's been such a privilege to work with them. And then I teach a New Testament and Old Testament at Buffalo University, and that too, that will wrap up, uh, the first week of December. And I teach students with intellectual disabilities, so autism, uh, and Down syndrome. And it has been my oldest daughter, Sydney. She said, Mom, there's no other job that's given you that has given you heart eyes than like that job, because it's been such a good passion project for me.I love those students and I'm glad that I get to finish up this with them. Uh, and we're church planning still. We've been in the process of church planting since, uh, fall of 2020. Really, really started to kick things off more like spring, summer, fall 2021. And now we are moving into this model of church that actually comes outta Seattle. Uh, it is in Seattle. It's known as Dinner Church, and we will call it Table Church. But it's simple. It's this, We meet around tables, we share food together. Uh, there is, uh, what's called a short Jesus story. So we just, uh, any, any of the stories that come out of the New Testament about Jesus, because I love the Old Testament, will sneak some of that in there too. Uh, and, and then it creates space for conversation about we're, what we're teaching about, and there are a few things that I really love about this.Something that's just really been on my heart lately is that when we come to these tables, there's no food insecurity. We don't know where people are coming from. We've had people join us who are homeless, to people who come from relatively significant wealth. I mean, at least comfort. And when we're at the table, it is an even playing field, and you only have to share your story or those parts of your story if you really want to. And, uh, it is just this way for us to get to know each other deeply, and for us to build this place of trust. So many people are coming out of situations where they've been hurt by church. And so for us to be able to have this, what's called fresh expression of church, which really is like original church, right? Book of Acts church is what this is. Uh, it's been so beautiful to watch this unfold and it's still unfolding. We're still figuring things out and how, how this will look for us and for our community specifically. So those are all the things, Danielle,Danielle (05:34):That's so many things. I mean, that's funny. You've been on a journey, right? We were, I think we paralleled like being in grad school together for a bit.And then you graduated and what's your master's degree in?Misty (05:46):It's a master of divinity.Danielle (05:48):Okay. So you're a boss,Misty (05:50):, that's the goal, right? I mean, that's the goal,Danielle (05:53):And so I, I know you were on this journey, like what is, uh, what does the next step in life mean? Like, I have my degree, what do I wanna do next? And so I know you've been exploring and allowing yourself to try different things, and I don't know if you'd be even be willing to speak about like what it was like to like live in that unknown or be exploring that.Misty (06:16):Yeah, so incredibly uncomfortable , so uncomfortable. Uh, you know, that part of my story is leaving a really traumatic church experience and, and feeling so confused because that happened just as my seminary time was ending and feeling like, Okay, God, I really feel like you led me into seminary. I feel like this was the right move. And yet here I am, uh, I'm no longer part of a church. Like we didn't have a church to attend. I wasn't working at a church anymore, and that was March, 2020. So it's pandemic. So finding a new place to come together to worship with people, uh, it it was just a really tricky PO process. And we have met some great church planters and church people along the way, and that's been part of this redemptive story for us, Uh, to see, to see healthy churches that are functioning well, people who really love each other.Well, that's been so good. And still, and I'm gonna be real honest here, that Tuesday morning, uh, so a week ago Tuesday, I'd been praying about this, this position that I was just offered. And I, and I've been praying for months, like, God, what, what is it that you want from me? Like, have I really missed so many cues for you? Or have I messed my life up too badly that something good can't come from this? And just so many big doubts. And that morning I'd had it really, my husband who has been working from home, uh, actually went into the office that day. So I had the whole house to myself, and it was my voice raised to God. And I don't mean like raised and praised, I mean like, I was yelling at God and tears and like, What do you want from me? And I'm so frustrated. And in that same time is when I was getting the email saying, Hey, can you send us your resume and cover letter for this job? So then I had to go back to God the next day and be like, Thanks for loving me how I am.But also like he sees, he sees these frustrations. He knows how difficult this liminal space is. And, uh, that is much as I know that I'm seen and known and loved by God. I couldn't feel that then I, I felt so, uh, yeah, not seen, not understood, not heard. And I know that timing and prayer isn't necessarily our timing. And still, I was just getting to the end of my patienceBecause you can't see, you can't see when the end is coming. Right. The, I didn't, there wasn't anything in my path at that moment that even looked like a glimmer of hope to me mm-hmm. and I was at my lips end.Danielle (09:20):Yeah. Yeah. So you've got an invitation to submit a resume and a cover letter. Like how did they find you? Do you know?Misty (09:27):So I'd applied for the job. Okay. And, uh, through an online application process. And they specifically wanted my resume and cover letter to go to a specific person, so that, to the hiring manager. So to send it again, which allowed me the possibility of rewriting my cover letter because I'm an overthinker Danielle, I, I wrote one, I sent it, it was specific to the job, but still kind of generic. And then I'm thinking about this over the course of like, what, three or four days? Like, Mm. I should have said this. So then I did.Danielle (10:00):Yeah. I love it that you gave your chance yourself a chance to rewrite the cover letter yourself permission to say, Hey, I wanna do this differently. And you tried it.Misty (10:11):Yeah. Yeah. And it's paid off. Uh, the meetings with this organization were so good. And now I have a friend who started working with them on Tuesday, and she, uh, has been just talking about her time with them so far, and how it seems to be like real relationship, like healthy relationship between, uh, director level and employee level and management. And, uh, so just, just to even have this hope of, of a healthy work environment mm-hmm. is really encouraging.Danielle (10:45):Right. Because part of what I think was like stalling was this traumatic event at this church organization.Misty (10:52):Yep. Yep. And all of these people who I believe really love Jesus, and yet people who really love Jesus can behave very poorly sometimes. So, uh, and, and I'm not, I I'm guessing that we're gonna have moments of that too in this new position. I am not looking for rainbows and unicorns here. I, uh, I hope to be in a space that, that we recognize when we are behaving poorly and can ask for forgiveness after that. And, and that's been some of the, the redemption, the restoration story from this church experience too, is that there's been lots of healing in those once broken relationships. And while they'll never be what they once were, they're so much better than what they were two and a half years ago.Danielle (11:45):How do you see your experience now as you're mo you've moved through so much liminal space and now you have like many jobs.Misty (11:54):It's too many.Danielle (11:55):Yeah. Too many. Like how do you see that traumatic experience right at the tail end of grad school? Like, has it reframed it for you? Has it cemented things for you? Like Yeah.Misty (12:07):Yeah. Good question. I, one of the things, it's made me more aware. So even going into the interview process for this new position, I was, uh, very upfront with the questions that I had about things like accountability and support for their leaders mm-hmm. . Uh, so how, how does this organization, uh, I don't know that you can actually ensure, uh, that there isn't going to be any bad behavior, but what, what are, what does this organization do to, uh, to try to prevent it anyway, to, to keep their people accountable? And there were some really good answers, and those were questions that I wouldn't have necessarily thought to ask before. Uh, because with the work that I do with our church plant, well, I'm the person that needs the accountability. And, uh, because that's something important to me. I'm, I'm, I'm very open and honest with the people that I'm leading.Uh, with the work that I'm doing at Bethel University, uh, I am accountable to a director who also is very open and communicative and also, and then, and then there's the work with Steph and Joe, and we just know them so well. So it's just not something that I even think about with them. But going into this, it's a larger organization with people that, I don't know, it made me more aware of. I, I want to know the answers to these questions before I would ever say yes. And it, it seems to me like they have really good systems in place, uh, to try and avoid some of maybe that celebrity culture that we've seen in the Christian realm in the last few years. And, and a lot of the shake up and the, the lights that, the light that's been shown on some bad behavior in Christian culture. Mm-hmm.Danielle (13:59):How do you, I think what I hear is you see yourself as part of the change.Misty (14:05):Yeah. Yeah. That's been my part of my hope.It was in the last church too. And, and part of that is there are a couple of things. One of them being a woman in ministry, uh, and coming out of a highly complementarian setting, uh, and also wanting something so different for the church as a whole. And I would, I would say specifically the, the Western church, uh, wanting to be part of something that's so much like in the community, getting to know the people, whether, whether people ever come to your church or not, But getting to know people and really caring for them. Uh, that's been part of the change that I've wanted to see. And now there are ways in which I get to be part of making it.Danielle (14:53):What things do you particularly latch onto as, um, as pre, like, as ways you wanna engage leadership?Misty (15:01):I love being able to see giftedness in people and then to challenge them to use their gifts. I also love learning from other leaders. So for instance, in our church plant, we're small. We are about maybe seven households right now. And, uh, in that, I've seen three other people who are excellent communicators. And so they, they teach for us sometimes on Sunday mornings, but also in that we have people in, even in the small group of people we have, uh, Gen Z through, I think boomers probably. Okay. And, uh, and then people, like my very own son-in-law right, is from El Salvador. And so we have different perspective from him. We have, uh, a family who, the husband in the family is African American, the wife is Iranian. And, um, so just learning different perspectives from different people and how do we incorporate that into our church? Because isn't at the beauty of the kingdom of God is people from every tribe and tongue and nation. And so I think to be an effective leader in our community, in our family, in our church, it's really about seeing people for who they are and how uniquely they're created and celebrating that instead of trying to make everybody be the same.Oh, it's been a really, um, maybe like more like Lewis and Clark style, right? Like, it's taking some time, it's taking some time. This isn't a, a fast trail. Um, cuz when you think about, okay, let's think about really creating a trail and like chopping down branches and making a path and going through storms and, and whatever that means, uh, there's a lot of grit that comes with it and, uh, you don't necessarily see the rewards right away. That's been one of the things that I've had to really hold onto in the last couple of years, is in a society that highly values instant gratification, that's not what this work is about. Mm-hmm. , this isn't about selling a product and seeing profits instantly or quickly. Uh, this is long, hard work that is so beautiful. And some of this, I would guess I may never see the results of it, Right. They may be things that happen in generations to come and can I sit in that tension and, and be okay with it. Mm-hmm. , it's been a lot. That's been a lot of inner work that I've been doing. Mm-hmm.Thank goodness for my therapist and my spiritual director because I don't know how I would do this without them.Danielle (18:03):Yeah. Talk to me a little bit how you care for yourself through this process, because clearly you have your mind around things, you're able to really articulate where you're coming from. And I, my guess is you're doing that with care.Misty (18:15):Yeah. Yeah. Self-care has been a key for me. And, uh, also I'm somebody who loves schedule and routine, and so that's gonna shake up a little bit in this next week. Uh, uh, like physical self care. So exercise has been super important to me. I love to lift heavy weights, , it's a really great way to get rid of some tension and walks. It's fall here in Minnesota right now, and it's beautiful. I know that winter's coming, but for right now, I'll enjoy fall. Uh, but my therapist and my spiritual director really are two key people in my life and functions so differently. Uh, and I tell, I tell my kids sometimes I feel like my therapist, I pay her a copay to be my friend , like, she's so lovely. Uh, uh, but just to have these, uh, so my therapist isn't somebody that I know outside of, you know, my normal life.She is a professional that I've met and, uh, has this perspective of my life that is different from the people who are in my life, who are who, right? She can give me this outside perspective of it. And then, uh, my spiritual director actually is a woman that I've known for, I think 20 years now, or almost 20 years. And she, uh, knows so much of my life and also, um, really is so very connected to the Holy Spirit. And so to have conversations with her, again, with both of these women, it's this opportunity to, uh, see pieces of my life from their perspective, things that I wouldn't see on my own. Uh, so that's been really key for me to, uh, keep, keep calm, uh, to stay focused. Uh, now clearly I told you I just freaked out at God, just a week ago. So that doesn't happen all of the time, but, uh, it does happen most of the time that I can stay focused on what really matters.Danielle (20:29):Yeah. So what, what are like your top three things you would tell to someone else in like coming through that liminal space?Misty (20:43):First, have really good people around you. Really good people. Yeah. Um, my husband has been incredibly supportive. Uh, he just, he's a really supportive man and, uh, has given me the space to like li sometimes physical space, like literal physical space. Like I need to be left alone to process some of these things, but also as somebody that I can have a conversation with. So him, our kids, friends, uh, the people in our church, like these are good people who've come alongside me. Uh, I also am a huge proponent of journaling, and that is because now I can look back, I actually have the same journal for, uh, the last two years. And I can look back on these pages and see some of these repeated prayers and repeated themes. And uh, it helps I think in those times where you, for, for me as a person of faith, where I'm like, Okay, God, are you even hearing what I'm saying to you? And, and then to see maybe the, the gradual answers, whether they're yes, no, not now, whatever they are mm-hmm.And then the third thing is to take time to see what really brings you joy.And I think that I, I read something or I saw something the other day about, uh, people who go through long periods of liminal space and can no longer even remember their why or, um, have like no sense of calling anymore because they are just trying to, Oh, it might have actually been stuff. And Joe, it it, it was this like, you just are so used to disappointment that you don't even know what it's like to like long for something or hope for something more. And that holding onto that hope can be really difficult when it's been such a long time since it's been affirmed.Danielle (22:49):Right. That feels hard to hear.Yeah. And you know, like those seasons of drought when, you know, hope is dangerous.Misty (23:02):Yes, for sure. For sure. Uh, I was in this training a couple of months ago and they were talking about, it was different language, but it was liminal space and how also also understanding how things might not go back to the way that they once were mm-hmm. . And so it's also learning to, to let go of something so that you can lead in the space that you're in instead of holding onto this hope of the past. Can we hope for something in the future, even if there's this hard thing that you have to let go of mm-hmm. that has been a, a theme in my life. I think you maybe know I turned 50 in August. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Yay. And I'm one of those people I'm super thankful for every year that I get, uh, I, I last both of my parents in the last few years and so you bet I'm gonna celebrate every single birthday that I get to celebrate.And I've always loved my birthday. I actually celebrate the whole month. But turning 50, I was thinking about this year of Jubilee and that comes from the Old Testament. And it was like after 50 years you release debts, you release people who had been enslaved to you. Um, like so there are these people that are coming out, uh, and have this freedom, whether it's freedom from debt or freedom from being somebody's servant. Well then also there's this letting go of the person who was holding onto the debt. So there it's this, this idea of, for me it's this idea of, okay, what do I need to let go of that I've been holding so tightly to so that I have a room for whatever God has next to me. And that too has been part of this process in the last couple of years. Okay. I'm holding on to some hopes and dreams of, of things from the past and those things, they're not reality anymore. And so can I let go of them so that I can be open and ready for whatever is next. And it's hard. It's been really hard, but it's also been what's been so good.Danielle (25:15):I just, I would love to ask people three questions. Okay. Okay. What are you reading right now? What are you listening to and who are what's inspiring you?Misty (25:26):Mm, good questions. I am somebody who reads lots of things at the same time, . So, uh, we as our church have been talking about spiritual practices. Uh, we've been calling them Jesus experiment. So I have been going back through some of Ritual Lotus's, the deeply formed life. And also I love that book. I, he is, he is just one of my favorites. I I share almost everything that he has on his Instagram cuz there's so much wisdom there. Uh, and then, uh, the Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. Those are a couple of things that I'm reading and I appreciate both of their perspectives. Uh, I listen to a pile of podcasts, so the Lead Stories podcast is one that I listen to every week. I so just for fun, I love The Office Ladies, have you ever listened to that or did you ever watch The Office?Danielle (26:20):No, I know what you're talking about though. ,Misty (26:23):It's so silly and it's so funny. So it's just a really nice way to not have to think about anything, just just to laugh about something. Gemma Kucher, that's another, I think her podcast is called Gold Digger. Like Gold Geo l Digger and that's primarily for entrepreneurs. But, um, I don't know, there's lots of good stuff that she shares too. And then was the last one what brings me joy orDanielle (26:49):What Yeah, sure. What brings you joy? Who or what's inspiring you?Misty (26:52):Oh, what's inspiring me? Well, the other thing that you know about us is our youngest went to college in August and uh, it's been a huge change just for all of us. Uh, so three kids. Our oldest is married and she and her husband just bought a house. So that's been exciting. Uh, our son's in Alabama so we don't get to see him actually very much. And then our youngest moves out, so it's just my husband and me at home now. And while he and I like we are enjoying our time together. Uh, it's been this really weird freedom of we don't have soccer games three nights a week anymore. So that's been so weird. Uh, but to see my kids, my kids really inspire me. So to see Sydney and her husband and they've been married now for two years and worked so hard and now that they, um, are working hard again cause they bought this house and there's lots of work to do and thankfully a lot of super handy.So we can do lots of things, but like to see them coming into their own and finding their own path and life. And now for, uh, London. Uh, so she goes to college the first week is like, Yeah, awesome. I'm on my own and I am making these new friends. And then a couple of weeks later it's like, hmm, there's some conflict between some of these people and I don't like conflict, but I don't really wanna address it. Mm-hmm. and maybe I should just transfer schools. I was like, okay. And then now we are at this place where she's finding where she fits and she is enjoying school and thinking that this will be the uni university that she'll be at for the next three and a half years or so. And to see them all go through such change mm-hmm. and they're doing okay.But, it's hard sometimes and, and too when like, I see her, our youngest who is almost 19, but still my baby mm-hmm. and she's hurting and she doesn't wanna go back to school mm-hmm. . Uh, but to see those things and no, I can't fix them and also I shouldn't fix them because it's part of what makes her her is learning how to take care of some of these things. Um, again, they're figuring it out and they're becoming stronger, better people for it. And uh, I just so appreciate them and all that. I get to learn, learn through them. I hope that they've learned some things from me, uh, but also I learned things from them.Danielle (29:33):Well, I'm sure they're learning things from you because one way to manage transitions is to have strong attachment with your parental figure or figure. And so I think that indicates some groundedness that you've instilled in given to them. So.Misty (29:49):Well, thank you for that encouragement,Danielle (29:51):Yeah. Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough, you know. Yeah,Misty (29:55):That's right. Yeah. There is no perfection in parenting.Danielle (29:59):No. Um, thank you so much for being with me and you know, I'd love to have you back and interview a guest or you know, love for us to collaborate in the future. So thank you.Misty (30:10):Yeah. Thanks for having me. This was so good. Yeah. Talking to you.Danielle (30:13):I know. Me too.