Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True Podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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Welcome friends, to this special two-part Insights at the Edge series. We’re going to be celebrating and talking about some of the very challenging, bold, and visionary ideas that are presented in a new book. It’s called How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation. And I have here with me the co-authors of the book, Justin Michael Williams and Shelly Tygielski.
In the first part I’ll be talking to Justin and Shelly about some of the main themes in the book. And then in the second part, we’re going to be having a very special guest—writer, director, producer, and activist Mario Van Peebles. So this is an exciting two-part series. I don’t do two parts of Insights at the Edge very often, but in this case, I think it’s not just warranted, it’s a flowering of my heart in support of the work that Shelly and Justin are doing, and the way that they’re putting themselves out there in such a bold and forward way.
Let me tell you a little bit more about Justin and Shelly. Justin Michael Williams is an award-winning speaker, Grammy-nominated top 20 recording artist. He’s a leading voice for diversity and inclusion and wellness. And with Sounds True, he’s the author of the book Stay Woke: A Meditation Guide for the Rest of Us. Shelly Tygielski is a Trauma-Informed Mindfulness teacher, speaker, a fierce justice warrior and social activist. She’s the author of the book Sit Down to Rise Up, and she’s the founder of Pandemic of Love, a global grassroots organization with more than 4,000 volunteers that was honored by CNN Heroes. And in 2022, Shelly co-founded Partners in Kind, which is a television and film production company inspiring change through storytelling.
All right, friends, let’s start with this. I’ve used the word bold now, I think I’m going to use it for the fourth time. Title of the book, How We Ended Racism. I have to be honest with you, when this title was first brought at Sounds True, I would say a few people in the room were excited and there were a few people whose eyes rolled, their eyes rolled back in their head. And someone said out loud, “Leave it to these two millennials to come up with something like this. Like come on, really?” And so I would like to know how you both stand in this title.
Justin Michael Williams: Oh, my gosh. Well, I’m so glad you’re starting with this question because the honest truth is we landed on the title and we were really settled on it. And then when we started sharing it with people, we got the same feedback. And people were like, “This is a big mistake.” One of our agents was even like, “This is terrible. This is not going to work. The title, it says all these things.” And we actually went into a mode where we were trying to change the title for a little while. Shelly and I almost got convinced of this. And then what happened is we actually sat with someone at the Garrison Institute where we were there, which is a big part of the fellowship that helped us actually cultivate the courage and the content for this book. And somebody sat with us and said, “Remember what you’re standing for, remember who you are, and what you’re bringing to the world. Why are you writing this book?”
And what I’ll say, Tami, that happened, instead of leaning away and trying to find a new title, we just leaned in even more. And there’s one little section that I always like to pull out from the book. It’s literally the first part of the introduction that we wrote. Because when people think of How We Ended Racism, the first response people said was, “Oh, we…” thinking we was just me and Shelly, like, “Oh, Justin and Shelly ended racism.” And we’re like, “You all, of course, that’s not what we’re saying, but OK.”
And so we wrote this little section that says who we are, and it says, “We are liberal and conservative. We are black, white and brown. We are Republican, Democrat, independent, oppressed and free, standing on the shoulders of all who came before us. We are the torch-bearers, relaying the torch to a destination that has never been reached before. We are a message from the future, ancestors and descendants at the same time. We are everything in between. We are now. It is time. We rise together.” So it’s like we’re all the we, and if we aren’t going to end racism, who the hell is?
Shelly Tygielski: That’s beautiful, Justin, thank you for starting out with that story because it’s actually incredibly true. I would say we were scared. We were scared to come out with the book, and I would say that now when people ask me about the title of the book, I as a White-presenting woman especially, I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of the boldness to use your word, the boldness of the title. There’s two things I just wanted to add really quickly. The first thing is I’m really flattered that you think I’m a millennial, but actually I’m a Gen Xer, but cool, that’s great. So leave it to the Gen Xers to have the chutzpah to think that they could end racism, for sure. But it’s going to take all of us, as Justin said, it is we. And I think really the key here is that we realize that we have to play a bigger game.
We have to play a different game than everything that we’ve been taught, everything that we’ve read, all of the work that’s been done before us, and build upon the shoulders, of course, of all the incredible work that people have been doing for generations. And we’re not discounting that in any way by putting a book out like this. But I think what we realize, as well, is in these times that we’re living in is that people have lost hope. People have lost this ability to envision that things are going to get better. That is literally the one cementing reason why we said, “OK, this is why we are going to pick this title,” because we have to restore hope to people and give them the ability to envision that this is possible. That ending racism is actually a real possibility.
TS: Now, towards the beginning of the book, you’re writing about the very first pillar, which is anchoring in this new vision. And you intelligently address those people who say, what are all the reasons why people say, come on, no way. And one of those reasons is look at all of those people out there, and I’ve tried this on a few people, “I’m going to be interviewing these two people on How We Ended Racism,” and when they roll their eyes they say, “But look about this person. Look about this person, look about this person, look about this person.” And you make the point in the book, “Well, we all know people who have changed,” and I thought, “Well, that’s true.” And we all know all kinds of people who seem more entrenched and more bigoted. So what do we do with this idea of, “Come on, look at all those people!”
JMW: Yes. One thing that I think I want to name first to make a connection point here for people is a big reason of the title being How We Ended Racism, because the whole position of the book is standing in the future, in a future where racism does not exist and looking back at now and asking, “What did we do? What would we have had to do to create this outcome?” And versus saying how to end racism, that’s not actually what we’re presenting here. We’re presenting a different frame, and the skepticism is a huge part of it, and we were skeptical too. Let us be real. We had skepticism when we first went about this, and we can talk about that later. But to go straight into your question, Tami, of “those people.” We all are going to have those people. If you’re liberal, you might say the conservatives are “those people.”
If you talk to conservative people, which we’ve talked to and who’ve read this book, they’re going to say, liberal people are those people. If you talk to people who are pro-life, they’re going to say pro-choice people are those people and vice versa. And if we keep doing that, we keep circling around the actual issue, instead of actually hitting the issue that we need to be hitting to make a change. And the last thing that I’ll say about this, and I’m sure Shelly, you have things to add here, is I do not believe, I really don’t fall for this story, nor do I really stand for it when anybody says it. I’m a queer Black millennial man.
I have traveled all over the world and all over the United States into places that are very conservative. I have family that lives in Alabama. And my experience— I can only name my experience, I’m not saying this is a truth— but my experience of the world is that this idea that everybody is against us and is so extreme and doesn’t want people to change, I don’t find that to actually be true most places that I go. Of course, we have extremes on both ends of the spectrum, but we actually don’t need those extremes to buy-in to make a change. We need all the people in the middle— who I think is most of us, on all sides, to actually see that we can come together.
ST: Right, Justin. We need a critical mass of people. And once we have a critical mass, then we’ve crossed over the threshold. What I want to say, Tami, to your question, is that I am one of those people. I am one of “those people,” who was raised as an Orthodox Jew, was born in Jerusalem, in a country that is really controversial, to a very hawkish right-wing family. Eleven of my family members died in wars that were protecting the country, and I was raised to fear the other. I was raised to immediately hate anybody who was Palestinian or spoke Arabic, or think about anybody that’s Muslim would want to harm me. And I changed.
I was able to create an entire paradigm shift and reframe my way of thinking through proximity, through a lot of these pillars, many, all of these pillars actually that we talk about in the book. The pillars themselves, when we thought about the main question, the big question that really led us to even write this book in the first place which was, can we end racism? Can racism even end? We had to reflect backwards and say, “Well, what conditions actually have to arise in humanity for us to even get there?”
And when I looked at my own life introspectively, I recognize that I had to go through this inner work, each one of these pillars, not necessarily in succession, and certainly returning to many of them many times over, but here I am with a mother that is an Orthodox Jewish woman, still to this day with some family members who choose to see me as the other and don’t talk to me anymore, but with friends who are Palestinian, who are Muslim, with coworkers and peers. And with organizational work that I’ve done in places like Gaza and the West Bank. So I am the other, I am that person. I was the skeptic. And so I can only tell you that through proximity and through this inner work, I was able to change. And so I am proof, I’m living proof, and I feel like that’s enough for me to be able to convince others, other individuals that this is possible.
TS: I want to speak for a moment, personally and from my heart, because I found the book, first of all, very, very, very well done. And also very confrontative, and it confronted me really from the beginning to the end actually, I have to say. And part of what I was confronted with at the beginning was… Shelly, you referred to how many of us feel hopeless at this time? And I wouldn’t go so far as to say I feel hopeless, but when I thought, “Can I even take this on? It’s 2050 and racism has ended, this is the premise of the thought experiment. How did we get here?” Then I thought, “Ah, come on. 2050? I’ll still be alive. I mean, maybe if they said 2700 or something, I could do the thought experiment successfully.” I probably could.
But 2050, I just can’t. One generation, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. And I had to confront my own pain around even… And the feeling underneath of helplessness and sadness and disappointment, and what happened to my own sense of the possible. And so I’m wondering if you could both speak to that and that person who’s coming to this conversation openhearted but is, perhaps, resonating with what I’m saying.
ST: Sure. Well, in the book we talk about the skeptic in all of us. We have a whole chapter and we talk about five different assumptions that can cause racism to persist. The first is what we’ve encountered often in our conversations with people and in our work—is that racism is unavoidable. People think, “It’s always been around. Racism is unavoidable. How can we suddenly make something that is such a part of being human suddenly not there?” And that’s actually a myth. That’s not true. Racism is a learned behavior, it’s not given, and it’s avoidable actually. What’s unavoidable is that biologically speaking, we have in groups and out groups, and now those have developed over time evolutionarily to keep ourselves safe. But even with these groupings, we can still eliminate the idea of using race, and so there’s full histories written about this.
This is not something that we’re just surmising or making up. There’s scientific proof of all of this. The second assumption is that race matters. People think that race is something that is really important because this, again, I’m pointing to myself, it’s the way that I was raised, that there is this hierarchy, if you will. We grow up with it. It’s how we relate to people. It’s unconscious, it’s conscious in some states. Skin color is a biological fact, but race is actually just a historical and a cultural fact. And the third thing is that when we talked about just now, those people will never change, but we know very much so that people are capable of changing and that we ourselves are also capable of changing.
One of the things that we talk about in the book also, Tami, is that people think that real change takes time, and you addressed this. Because you’re like, “2050? That’s like tomorrow. I’m going to be alive. How is that even possible?” But when you actually look at how long change has taken, for Apartheid to end, for us to get people to believe that a man or a person could land on the moon, or the first diagnosis of HIV and where we are today, right, with the fact that it’s no longer a death sentence if you have the HIV virus. We give so many examples of change happening within a lifetime.
Because again, as Justin said earlier, we have a critical mass. We’re able to overcome the threshold. And the last thing is that people ultimately throw up their hands and they say, “Well, we don’t know how to end it.” So because they don’t know how to end it, they just give up. They don’t even want to get started because it seems like you’re just going to, like Sisyphus, you’re going to completely take this boulder up the hill, and it’s just this futile effort. But what I could tell you is that without a shadow of a doubt, this is not foolish optimism on our part. Every single tool that humanity needs to end racism already exists. It is available to us. The only thing that is stopping us is the will, is the agency, the decision point to actually use those tools. So that’s really how we address it in the book.
JMW: Yes. And along with the decision to use the tools, we believe in what we’re trying to bring to the world, if anything, is a belief that it can happen. We’re trying to get people to see—
ST: Amen.
JMW: —that ending racism is not… We had anthropologists, neuroscientists, psychotherapists, we had science to boot for this before we even started writing the book to ask, is this possible? Because we were both like, when we asked the question in our fellowship, we were in the Garrison Institute fellowship together and they invited us to ask big questions. And the question we asked is, “Can racism end?” And we were both like, “I don’t know if it can end, can it end?” And so when we got all this scientific backing at first, that said, “Absolutely, yes, it can end.” But one of the first steps that has to happen is people actually need to believe that it can end because if they don’t believe it can end, they’re never going to pick up the tools to end it, and keep pushing it to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation.
And so this is why we didn’t say, “How we ended racism someday,” or, “How we end racism in 2700.” It’s, “We have the tools now, so let’s end it.” And I will say really quickly, Tami, when we hear this concept of 2050, the reason we put this in place is, think about when you run into a friend you haven’t seen in a while at the grocery store, and you go, “I miss you. It’s been so long. Oh my gosh, we should hang out.” And they’re like, “Yeah, we should hang out.” “OK, I’ll call you sometime.” What does that mean? You’re never going to talk to them again, sometime. “Someday, yes. When I have time.” And so there’s a different thing that happens in our coordination when you run into that friend and say, “Oh my gosh, it’s so good to see you. What are you doing on Wednesday? Are you busy on Tuesday?” Now, we’re in a conversation exchanging actual information.
And so to give people a real context, Shelly gave some examples, and I just have some of the numbers in front of me to help people really see what’s possible. Apartheid in South Africa, which is probably the closest example that we, as Americans, can think about with this. The whole thing from its starting to it ending was 46 years, the whole thing. And so, think about the Holocaust. We have this in our book as well. From the Holocaust, [BRRRR] start to end, I’m looking at it right here. Hitler’s first position of leadership and the formation of the Nazi Party all the way to the end of the Holocaust was 12 years, 12.
And so we’re dealing with something that we actually have all the tools to end that science shows us can end, that we have research institutions, organizations, colleges, companies, New York Times-bestselling books, everything to end this thing. And somehow, we’re like, “I don’t know if I believe it can happen,” so we’re just trying to get people to believe, is really our main point here.
TS: All right. You both mentioned that we have all the tools to end racism. What are you referencing when you say that the tools?
JMW: Shelly, you want to speak to this one?
ST: Yes. Well, I mean, a lot of them are the ones that we talk about in our book and certainly—
JMW: There are more.
ST: —we address this in the book and we say, “Look, these are the eight pillars of possibility that we are grounded in and that have been helpful to us and in our research, and that we’ve personally been affected by. However, we understand that there are certainly more tools in that.”
But what we talk about really as the eight pillars of possibility, the first tool is vision. So we talked about this, creating a vision, standing in the future, looking back at what is actually possible, getting people to believe that we can in fact reach that mountaintop. The second tool—
JMW: Let me jump in Shelly, really quick before you go to the second one.
ST: Yes, sure.
JMW: I don’t want to lose this thread.
ST: Yes.
JMW: This is the reason Martin Luther King’s family, Martin Luther King III and Arndrea Waters King wrote the endorsement and foreword on the cover of our book because they said, “This is what Martin Luther King Jr., who everybody talks, about was doing,” setting a vision that to everybody at that time felt impossible. In fact, the vision that he had for the world, especially towards the end of his life, started to be so big for the world that, back then, his approval ratings weren’t what they are now. Because people thought, “He’s thinking so out of the box. This is not realistic.” And so this is why we feel so grateful and so honored that they actually wrote this endorsement and the foreword for this book because it helps us see that we’re on the right track of trying to set this, continuing the legacy of creating a vision that’s big enough for us to step into, so that’s why that’s the first pillar that we always talk about is vision.
ST: Thank you for that, Justin. A great point. The second pillar is actually really controversial in these times, which I will tell you is still shocking to me, that agreeing on a definition of truth in this day and age is something that would be so controversial. So we talk about assertions and assessments and how we can make grounded assessments, and we can get more into that as time goes on. But the truth, defining the truth, agreeing on the truth, understanding the nuances and how even if we’re making an assessment, even if we’re telling ourselves stories, we’re able to ground them more deeply and understand where those stories are coming from.
The third is something that Justin and I talk about a lot. We use this really when we teach, even when we’re not teaching in this modality, and that’s emotions. And I know that you’ve probably done so many podcasts about just this topic alone, knowing how to name your emotions, knowing how to identify the experience that you’re feeling, how you’re reacting to your emotions. So many people don’t have the know-how. They don’t have the tools because they haven’t learned them yet, but the tools exist. How do we identify, how do we connect with our emotions? How do we, as Dr. Stan Siegel says, name them to tame them.
TS: Yes. And before Shelly, actually, before you go on for a moment, because it sounds to me like what you’re describing are all of the eight pillars that you go into quite some depth with in the book, How We Ended Racism. But I want to just take a moment here, because what I found in my own experience of being confronted by the material that you lay out in the book, is being confronted by owning the emotions that are related to not believing the premise of the book. And I’m curious what you’ve discovered about that, the emotions. Could you give people some counsel here?
JMW: Yes.
TS: Emotions come up for them even as they’re listening to the conversation so far. And part of them is excited and wants to be part of what you’re describing. “Yes, I’m going to see you on Wednesday, old friend. We’re going to get this done on a timeline. Yes, I’m with Justin and Shelly.” But then there are all these other emotions, “Believe, come on, believe, I’m going to shoot you the paper or something. I can’t just make some leap of nonsense, whatever. “What do we do with all those feelings intelligently?
JMW: If I jump in with something here. There’s a person who we referenced in the book a few times, and thank in the back named Jim Selman, who’s been a big coach of ours, who continued to really push us on this topic. I mean, we had to be pushed because our emotions came up around this too.
ST: Yes.
TS: Are we crazy? Is this really?
JMW: Especially when we would get critical feedback and as we kept anchoring in, there are two things that I want to say. One, honor, claim, name your emotions as they’re coming up and you’re being challenged throughout reading this book. And number two, don’t let your emotions dictate your commitments. Because if your emotions are dictating your commitments, then your commitments are tethered to the weather. They’re changing depending on how you feel. And if we can let our emotions dictate our commitment to our path, then the path, we never end up walking forward towards where it is that we want to go.
And so what I tell people, even for myself, are there days that I wake up and see what’s in the news and see what’s going on and think, “Damn, I don’t know, y’all. We’re getting ready to call the aliens to beam me up or something because this is too much going on here.” Of course I have these days, but if I let those moments of hopelessness or despair or fear or skepticism, dictate what I’m saying I’m committed to, then I’m lost. Because emotions are meant to change. They’re meant to come and go.
They’re meant to fluctuate. We’re meant to experience the highs and the lows. And so this is one of my biggest pieces of counsel is, feel everything you want to feel. But I want to ask those who are willing to step in and say, “You know what? I’m committed to seeing a world without racism before I die. I’m committed to not passing this shit on,” excuse my language, “to my grandkids and kids and kids and giving them the burden. I’m committed.” Then I’ll say this, “Yes, name how you feel,” but it doesn’t matter how you feel. Keep stepping forward because this is the pathway that we’re on. And so anyway, that’s my soapbox about emotions.
ST: Well, Justin, so, great soapbox. And what this brought up for me is that we can direct people to the pledge that we have online. So we have a website called, HowWeEndedRacism.com, and there’s a ton of resources, and there’s worksheets and there’s guided meditations that you can listen to. But there’s also a pledge. And the pledge is really you in a very tangible way, signing on and telling us, not just telling yourself, but telling us, telling the world, I am committed. I am signing my name. I’m committed to working and doing everything I can, within my power, no matter how small I may think it is, to…
JMW: Ending racism.
ST: Ending racism.
JMW: Yes.
TS: Now, I asked you both about that you said, we have the tools, and you were describing, Shelly, the eight pillars and the very many tools that are contained within the book. And one of the ways that you weave together the tools, is this notion of how our inner work relates to the outer change that we are working towards. And I wonder if you could just make some general comments, because I think a lot of people would say, “We owned our emotions. Really? That’s the tool we need, is this greater emotional intelligence? That’s a key? Oh, that’s an inner process. That’s not going to change X, Y, Z systemically.” But you link these, and I’d love to hear more about that.
ST: Well, we designed the book to really resemble, visually, for those people who are listening that are visual thinkers. If you think of an infinity sign or a figure eight on its side, and we thought about, that the inner work is one of those kind of loops, and the outer work is the other loop. And they’re obviously intersecting and connecting at the middle. And I think that for a lot of people—and I am saying this on a personal basis as a practitioner, and I’ve said this in conferences and I’ve said this to rooms filled with thousands of people and called people out. There are so many people, especially in this industrial wellness complex that we live in, that are so committed to doing the inner work, getting the pedigrees, getting that certification, going on retreat, however you define self-care, and there’s so many different definitions.
And yet, when I challenge people and I ask people, “What are you doing with that certification? How are you showing up differently? How is it connecting in a tangible way to making a difference?” Yes, sure, it’s making a difference maybe in your life, and then indirectly because of that, it’s creating these ripples. But beyond that, how are you in a tangible way committed to showing up and doing something different when you see that there is an injustice or you’re outraged about something, or you see something on the news that really gets you going, rather than just saying, “Oh, that’s a shame,” and then moving on. Do you ask yourself these fundamental questions about, how to use now these tools that I have? I identified my emotions, I understand where I’m feeling them. I nurtured myself. I got myself to a place where I am OK, and I recognize that I in my body am OK.
Now, let me look outside of myself and see who is in my community, who are the people that I can touch or that I touch on a daily basis in my household at work, in my community, in my neighborhood, and how do I just start there? How do I make sure that every single person that is in my circle of influence is OK? Not just like, “Hey, how are you?” “I’m OK,” but really good. They’re doing well. They have enough. They’re not constantly living in present-day trauma on a daily basis, in a cyclical way. And how do we use our privilege?
So we challenge people in the book, we say to them, “Yes, the inner work, you should never skip over the inner work because the only way to actually make a change is to understand what your biases are, why you’re acting a certain way, what your beliefs are, why these doubts are coming up. But if you can then grab ahold of that, nurture it, understand it, and understand that you have a choice, you have the agency to not just react to it, but you can actually respond to all of those things that are coming up for you. And you have the tools to do that. You can help make a change in the world.”
JMW: Yes. And I think the other thing that I’ll add on to this, Shelly, I’m over here just like, “Amen. Yes, girl. Yes, sister. Yes, I’m with you,” is this. People like to start this work with what they can do. People always come to us and ask, “What do I do? And how do I have tough conversations? How do I talk to my family members, who are those people who believe different than me? How do I get them to think differently? How do we get these laws to change?”
And we cover all of that, but not until the second half of the book. Because what we know is that if you haven’t done the inner work on yourself, you can’t even show up to do anything that’s going to make a meaningful difference, that’s going to last. Because you’re going to show up to the conversation with your family members triggered, defensive, irritated, and with your preconceived notions of how the conversation’s going to show up based upon your own biases and your own things.
And so this is why it’s such an important piece. While every single chapter, we kind of weave this infinity symbol of, what is the inner work, which essentially says, who do we have to become in order to be a person who actually could be ready to live in a world without racism? Because so many of us say we want a world without racism, but we’re not actually even ready to receive that world. That world could show up in front of us and our own biases, our own preconceived notions and ideas about people, will actually just make it more toxic and reinforce the same thing that we’re trying to fight against.
ST: Yes.
JMW: This is why the inner work is so important.
ST: And can I just say that Justin and I talk about this often, and when we address corporations as well, we talk about this especially nowadays, this is why we believe that there were so many shortcomings to the whole movement with diversity, equity, and inclusion and the gaps that exist. We recently did a whole presentation and looked at a recent study that was done, that showed that 70% of employees that had to go through DEI training, feel that that training fell short in some way. And the reason why, after millions and millions and millions of dollars were in time and effort and energy was, it’s not that the intention wasn’t there.
We truly believe that a lot of these companies, especially the ones that we’ve started working with, the intent is there, of course, they want to do the right thing. But painting over a wall that has cracks on it and not actually addressing the cracks, doing the inner work, expecting people to be able to show up when you’re handing them the outer work tools first, it doesn’t work. You cannot put a roof on a house that doesn’t have a stable foundation.
And so I think what we’ve been doing, especially in this country, in the United States, is we’ve completely ignored that the house is crumbling down. We’ve completely ignored that we have bursting pipes and that the foundation is not stable and that the roof is caving in, because we all believe, and this is to use Isabel Wilkerson’s metaphor from Caste, we all believe that we didn’t build a house, so why is it our responsibility? Or we just don’t understand that we can’t come to this work, the outer portion of this work without having done the inner work first.
TS: This statement, Justin, that you made, who do we need to become in order to live in a world without racism? I think that’s part of what I found so confrontative about the book, was that it helped me see certain areas of my own makeup that I wasn’t aware of. And Shelly, you talked about this second pillar, which is really looking at the whole question of truth and what’s an assertion and what’s an assessment. And I was surprised at how illuminating I found this. I started using it in all kinds of conversations. I was like, “That’s an assessment. We don’t know.” And assertion being facts, the facts of the matter, the facts. And assessment being our interpretation of something. And I wonder, how do you think people starting to make this distinction between facts and interpretation, can help us become the kind of people who recognize our own biases?
JMW: OK, this is really good. I’ll tell you of all the things of the book, I love the whole book, but this is one that I just love. It really gets us to see what’s happening inside of our own selves, and particularly what you said, Tami, to see that, “Oh, I might actually have beliefs that are causing racism to persist based upon my own stories.” And so, one of the things, so I’ll just give people a little simple practice around this. This is the simplest thing that you could possibly do. You get a sheet of paper out, it could be the back of an envelope for all I care, draw a line down the middle, on the left side, you say, “Here are the facts.” And on the right side you say, “Here are all the stories I’m making up about those facts. Here’s all the stories in my head. Here’s everything that I think to be true.”
I’ll just give two examples. One that is really basic that everybody can get, and then one that I’ll pull into the context that we’re talking about today. So for example, I am 5 foot, 10 inches tall, and so that is a fact. You would put that on the side. That is objective. Anybody, at all, could come and measure me and see that I’m 5’10, no matter what their beliefs are. OK?
Now, you could go, what’s a story that you make up about that? And some people’s story would be, “Justin’s tall,” or “Justin’s average height,” or “Justin is short,” depending on the circumstance, the subjective experience that I’m having. If I’m standing next to a group of basketball players, professional basketball NBA players, somebody’s going to say, “Justin’s short.” If I’m sitting next to a bunch of kindergartners, you’re going to say, “Justin’s tall.” So these are stories that we’re making up. Now, what becomes challenging for us to apply and where we get to really do this work is when somebody says, “We should not have guns in the United States.” That’s not a fact. That is your opinion. That is a story.
ST: That’s an assessment.
JMW: That is an assessment. We call it an assessment in the work. When someone says, “Women should have the right to choose,” that is an assessment. When someone says, “Whatever it is that we are believing is right about the world, conservatives are this, liberals are this, this person should be this,” those are assessments. Now what we can do is we can go to our facts to figure out how to ground it, and we can go, “OK, well, that’s my assessment, but let me look at the facts, right?”
There’s a fact that the United States has the highest number of gun violence related deaths in X, Y, Z. That’s a fact. The assessment that we make of that, is our meaning-making machines. It’s hard for us because we’re going to go, “No, but this is true.” When we can back off of that and go, “Actually, it’s not true. It’s just what I believe.” Now, there is a door open for conversation, and if we can’t get to that point, there’s never going to be a conversation because everybody believes their assessment is true. And so this is why we start with this so early in the book. Was that helpful, Tami?
TS: It is, and I wonder if you could just connect the dot very explicitly, how knowing this distinction is a critical tool on our road to ending racism.
JMW: Oh, yes. Well, because it is a critical, and Shelly, you can feel free to jump in here. If we cannot understand and know the things that we are believing and saying, and understanding if what we’re saying is a fact—an assertion, or a story—an assessment, if we can’t do that, we can’t have any conversations with anyone across divides. We can’t actually see clearly about how to end racism. We can’t talk with people across the aisle, which is that’s what everybody wants to do, right? How do we talk across the aisle? How do we create a bridge? Well, if you can’t do this first and get clear on the stories and facts, then you’re going to be on the bridge just fighting over whose story matters more versus hitting the actual issue itself.
ST: This is such a foundational pillar, and it’s really foundational in the later parts of the book where we really give tools like the SUSS It Out process, which is an acronym that we’ll talk about later, that Dr. David Gruder basically trademarked and developed. And without being able to anchor in the truth first, you cannot have those conversations, the difficult conversations, when you have two very opposing views, polarized views, about an issue that is a contentious topic.
And we’ve done this in person, in retreat. We’ve done it online during Covid, when one of the most contentious topics was vaccinate or don’t vaccinate. You remember those debates that were happening. And when we were able to get people to understand, “OK, let’s start separating things out and putting them in piles. What’s in assertion? What’s an assessment? And how do we ground those? Now let’s have a conversation,” because we could see that where we thought there were no intersections at all, there were no connecting points, there actually are some.
TS: Now, the biggest section of the book, the pillar that gets the most attention is the pillar that has us doing what you call shadow work. And this is where, yes, confrontation upon confrontation. And there was a section that you write about, which is, you call it looking at the supreme. To end racism, we can’t just focus on eradicating white supremacy. We must eradicate the concept of supremacy in general. And what I noticed is I had some hidden ways that I thought X, Y, Z people were supreme, including queer people, we’re really supreme in this way or that way, and I’ll go to bat for that. And I was like, “Holy God, Tami.”
If you are going to, Justin, to your phrase, to become the kind of person who can live in a world without racism, I have to really question a lot of these assessments I’ve made about which kind of people are supreme in which ways. So I wonder if you can talk some about that, and really the inner work we have to do to uncover these types of biases in us. What kinds of questions do you suggest people ask themselves in this regard?
JMW: Yes, when you said shadow work, I was like, “I hope she talks about supreme because this is a topic that I think is so important for several reasons.” But just to anchor this for people, when we think of supremacy, we always think of white supremacy first. And I want to be clear that, as Tami mentioned, we all have a relationship to supremacy in some way. And we think about the word supreme, it means situated above or the highest.
And for something to be supreme, it has to be considered the best, which means we have to put something else under it. And so for some of us, we have, I’ll call, spiritual supremacy, oh, because we’re in this alternative spiritual community, and we have certain beliefs. People who are fundamentalist religion are less than us or less evolved in some kind of a way. Or because I’m, like you said, queer, people in these straight communities, we’re better in some way, and we all have this.
And so we get people to ask some really cool questions in the book that helps them identify their supremacies, whether it’s black, white, religious, queer, all kinds of things that could happen. Some examples that we give are, and there are many more. These are just some that we list in the book, Black supremacy, Latino supremacy, college-educated supremacy, rich supremacy, Christian supremacy, Jewish supremacy, heterosexual supremacy, Democrat supremacy, Republican supremacy, there’s so many.
And so a few questions that somebody might consider asking themselves is, you have to first… Shadow work is all about giving yourself permission to see what you normally wouldn’t see, what you’re not admitting to yourself or what’s hidden in the background, but that is making your choices for you. So of course, we have lots of in our shadows, with lots of things in our shadows, but the things we want to focus on are the things that are making our choices for us, especially when those choices are moving us in the opposite direction of where we say we want to go or where we say we’re committed to going.
And so if we can be real with ourselves and say, “I can answer this with no repercussions. This is just for me.” And you say, “If I’m being really honest with myself, who and what do I consider supreme?” And then you can ask yourself, “How did you get that standard? What is creating that standard for you?” And then this is a big question, “If that supremacy wasn’t true, let’s assume that was false. What are you afraid of? If your supremacy wasn’t better than anyone else, does that bring up any kind of fear for you in some way?”
And then to ask yourself, “How may I personally be adding to the continuation of this supremacy in my life?” And then the last question that I’ll say to ask that really helps you put this in frame is, “Now that you’ve named what’s supreme, and how you may be adding to it, who are the groups, or groups of people who you’re considering less than you?” And I know everyone listening to this is probably going to think, “We’re all one. No one’s less than, we’re all the same.”
Sure, and I know you have this somewhere inside, so get real with yourself for a second, because this is what shadow work is all about. And who is less than you if that’s supreme? And now you can ask yourself, “How do you want to change your relationship to this?” Shelly, you were going to say something?
ST: No, I was just going to say, how do you want to change this? But also, right, where is it coming from? That’s where the shadow work. Where is it coming from? Why do I feel this way?
JMW: And there’s a difference between, I want to be clear, we’re not suggesting that you don’t have affinity groups and celebrate your communities and think that they’re amazing, right? And love and enjoy being queer or being a lesbian, or being Black or being Jewish, love and enjoy that. But can we do that without it being at the expense of another community’s dignity at the same time? If we can’t learn to do that, this is why this is one of the pillars for racism to end. This is exactly what happens with racism. That’s what it’s built upon. And so we’re continuing to reconstruct it in all these different ways, and it starts with unpacking it in our own lives.
TS: We have the tools to end racism. You’ve both said that, and in the book, you offer people those tools and many, many, many inner worksheets. And I think one of the illuminating insights for me, is that the work to end racism, when we look out at the world, it seems, “Oh God, it’s so hard. There’s so much to do.” The inside work, that’s also really hard! And there’s a lot to do! There’s a lot more to do on the inside than I thought before reading How We Ended Racism. There’s a lot of inner work to do.
JMW: Yes.
ST: Yes.
TS: Well, one coach said to me recently, I mean, I don’t know if this is politically correct to say it, but she said, “It’s not for sissies.” She was like, “This is tough stuff, the self-confrontation.”
Now, here’s the note I’d like to end just our first half, and I’m so glad that this is a two-part conversation that we’re having, which is in the eighth pillar. It’s about taking action. Shelly, you were very clear that this is an infinity symbol where the inner work and the outer work are flowing in and out of each other.
In this section on taking action, you talk about what it means to tend our own garden, to take action right where we are, right where we’re standing, in the sphere of influence that we have with the skills that we have. You share the story about Pandemic of Love and how that came into being. I wonder if you can share that with our listeners with the notion of describing also how there are some key takeaways about how we can end racism using some of the principles that you put into action in the forming of Pandemic of Love.
ST: Sure. Well, tending to the area of the garden, I just want to give everyone that full proverb, that full quote. So beautiful. It’s that we should each tend to the area of the garden that we can reach. That really has become a mantra for my life because the world is daunting. The problems of the world are daunting. There are many, many problems that seem insurmountable, too big.
We forget that if we just consistently and persistently do small things and we show up on a daily basis and commit to doing that, that big changes can actually happen because they all build upon each other. Especially if everybody around us is also tending to their own gardens as well and doing the same work, the collective of that is really powerful.
I started Pandemic of Love. I was living in South Florida at the time. I had a meditation community with about 15,000 people at the time. We had been gathering every Sunday morning on the beach, 40 out of 52 weeks a year for three, four, or five, probably closer to five years at that time.
When the pandemic hit—and I ask people to just go back to that moment if they can in their minds and in their hearts, because we seem to forget now, now that we’re past COVID, past the pandemic, certainly the traumas are still there, but we forget how scary that was. We had no idea how to test for this. We didn’t have enough PPE. We didn’t have any idea of how long this would take or how it was going to affect our lives or the lives of the people that we love. I was fearful just like everyone else for the people in my life, but I also started to think about the people in my community that I really got to know, people that I knew that were struggling. These are the people in my garden that I could tend to.
It’s Judy and Joan and David and all of these people that I could just picture in my mind knowing this is a single mom who relies on free lunch and breakfast for her three kids five days a week. Suddenly she’s going to have to come up with 10 more meals for these kids. Oh, and she doesn’t have a computer at home. How are they supposed to go to school? And she doesn’t have Wi-Fi. And oh, she works as a waitress and the restaurant shut down. How is she going to support herself?
All of these questions started to swirl in my mind, and I realized that, wait a minute, for every single person in my community that has a need, we also have a lot of people in the community that have privilege, that have more than enough. They have the ability to help somebody, and they’re now in a stage where they’re looking around thinking, what can I do? How can I help?
I felt really compelled. I go through, I talk about this practice, and this is a practice that I’ve been doing now for years, even pre-Pandemic of Love. I started leaning into this practice, thanks to learning it from Tara Brach years and years ago at a retreat, the RAIN practice, recognize, allow, investigate, nurture. Many of your listeners will be familiar with this method.
But that’s the inner work. I started to think about, how do I move beyond the rain? What comes after the rain besides rainbows? What comes after the rain? How do I ask myself these introspective questions, to do this inner work, go through this process of allowing myself to feel the angst and the outrage and the fear and all of the emotions that we want to usually shrink away from, and ask myself and think about what can I tangibly do? How can I tend to the area of the garden that I can reach?
Just one person. It starts with the power of one. The power of one is like the metaphor is if you take a pebble and you throw it in a pond, what happens? Ripples start to develop. They’re far-reaching. They will go further than the eye can even see. If you can believe and have faith that if you are the pebble, you are that stone that’s getting thrown into the pond, and just allow yourself to take that leap of faith into the water knowing that you’re going to create a ripple with the power of one.
Going through that process, the two questions that I asked myself after sitting for several sessions for many consecutive days was, OK, now I know how I’m feeling. I’ve nurtured myself. I know that I’m OK. I’m going to be OK. My family, the people that are in my immediate household are going to be OK. What can I do in a tangible way? What’s one thing? Let me just allow any answer that comes up to wash over me like waves of an ocean.
I came up with probably 10 or 12 ideas, and one of them was, “You know what? I’m going to create a link. I’m going to create a form that says, ‘get help’ and see what people need help with. I’m going to get some data, and then I’m going to create a link that says, ‘give help’.” I just did this on Google Forms. There was no organization, there was no website, there was nothing.
The second follow-up question, which was really important, and this is my litmus test for everything really is, and how do I come from a place of love? We talk about this in the book because as it pertains to racism specifically, a lot of things that happen when another black man is shot and murdered and we have footage that’s on our social media feeds, when we see outrageous things happening every single day in our communities across the world, definitely in this country, the thing that we can do when we ask ourselves, what can we do? What can I tangibly do in this moment?
We may come up with things that are steeped in anger because that is what we’re feeling. We may come up with solutions that are not coming from a place of love. If you have to ask yourself, is this really coming from a place of love? And if the answer is no, then that’s not a good solution. But if it’s really purely coming from a place of love and it’s coming from a place that isn’t steeped in fear or outrage or any of those emotions that can lead us astray, and many have, then I would say go for it. Do it.
We talk about this in the book, about this practice and about how we underestimate the power that we have as human beings. I will tell you that I never had the intention of doing more than helping just the people in my garden, the people in my community. What ultimately happened, as you said, this movement of Pandemic of Love became, no pun intended, viral. It went around the world and came back. We were able to show that, yeah, sure, there’s diseases that are viral, but also love and hope and faith and all of these other really wonderful things can be viral too.
TS: When it comes to realizing a new possibility in one generation, How We Ended Racism, you challenge people to find their action step in their garden. Maybe Justin, you can just comment on that, that challenge that you throw out to people.
JMW: Yes, we set up something inside of the book because I think it’s easy to see someone like Shelly or I who we have meditation communities that are 15,000 people and we travel the world and we do this, and you think, “Oh, those people can do something, but what can I do?” We give people a worksheet in the book that helps them identify their personal passions and get clear on the assets that they actually have that can make a difference.
There are things that people sometimes don’t think about. There are things like playing an instrument or singing or people who love to read or write poetry or blog or if you have a business that you work or woodworking, construction, welding, prayer, acting, so many things, outdoor recreation, fishing, bicycling, and things that people in our communities have done.
We have so many examples from us teaching this work out in the world now of someone creating a hiking group that was bringing people together across divides from different sides of town. It’s a hiking group where normally it’s just the people from this side of the highway go on the hike, but now intentionally, they brought two leaders together to bring these men together from different sides of the community to go on a hike. That is helping to end racism. Going into a library in your community and reading children’s books that help people see across divides, that is helping to end racism. Teaching this to your families and your kids.
I want you to know that when we say tend to your area of the garden, it’s with what you have now. You don’t have to become an influencer. We don’t ask you to build a social media following. We’re asking to look at the garden that is in front of you and that the only thing that you need to become is someone who is willing to say yes, who’s willing to show up. This is what we invite people to do, to tend to their area of the garden.
TS: I’ve been talking with Justin Michael Williams and Shelly Tygielski. Together they’ve written this new book, How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation. I will say, whatever you think. “Oh, I know what’s in that book.” I would say ,pick it up. There’s going to be a lot of surprising, confrontational worksheets for you to go through. If you actually go through this book page by page, it is a growth manual and an opportunity for us to come together and racism in one generation. So proud of both of you and that you’re such dear friends to Sounds True.
Come back, everyone, for part two. We have Mario Van Peebles. He’ll be talking with us about this whole notion of ending racism in one generation for part two of this special podcast series on Insights at the Edge.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. “I’m no saint.” That’s what we say when we falter or stumble in our everyday life, yet Lama Rod Owens teaches us that our human imperfection does not disqualify us from being what he calls a new saint. In fact, the path of compassion requires us to fully embrace ourselves as ordinary, struggling human beings who are dedicating our lives to being of service, to living in a way that brings warmth and healing to others, living in a way that helps create a more just world. You can learn more about Lama Rod’s new book, a book for our time, it’s called The New Saints, at SoundsTrue.com or wherever books are sold. And now back to Insights at the Edge.
Hello friends, and welcome to part two of our special Insights at the Edge series on How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation. That’s the title of a new book by Justin Michael Williams and Shelly Tygielski. They are here with us for part two of this conversation with our very special guest, Mario Van Peebles, actor, director, producer, activist.
Maybe you know Mario for his directorial debut in New Jack City. He started acting professionally on the stage when he was just 11 years old, and his feature film breakout was in the movie Heartbreak Ridge with Clint Eastwood. Now, there’s a lot I could say about Mario, so just stick with me here. I’m going to say a bit more.
Mario’s not afraid to take on subjects that challenge. He wrote, directed, produced, and starred in Armed, a psychological thriller about a good guy with easy access to meds and weapons of war. Passionate about social justice and raising eco consciousness, Mario did a series called Mario’s Green House, chronicling his family’s comic attempts to go green while living in Hollywood.
In the documentary space, he did The First Amendment Project for Sundance featuring the renowned poet Amiri Baraka. He made Fair Game? which explored the prison industrial complex, and Bring Your ‘A’ Game, which shares the necessary skills for young black boys to thrive and survive. Now he’s directing a new docuseries following civil rights leaders and activists in the upcoming 2024 election cycle. We’re so blessed, Mario, that you’re here with us for this conversation. Thank you.
Mario Van Peebles: Good to be here.
TS: I wanted to start, Mario, and ask you how you relate to this notion, which is the core premise of the book, How We Ended Racism in one generation, how you relate to the notion of starting in the future with a vision of racism having ended, and then working our way back from that point, holding out that vision.
MVP: Well, I think that there’s a great metaphor in the book that they use where they sort of liken people’s attitudes towards racism, towards moving into or inheriting an old house and that people go, “Well, it’s not my fault. Those beams that are not working or this and that happened, that predated me. I had nothing to do with it.” Yet you’ve inherited the house and have to live in it, and ultimately your kids will have to live in it.
It’s sort of one of those things where you can say, “Yes, it’s not directly my fault, but I either profit from it or I lose from it, but it affects where we are now.” The French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same. History doesn’t just repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And so there’s that.
There’s another great metaphor in the book How We Ended Racism that I love, which is that you can’t drive forward if you’re just looking in the rearview mirror. You’ve got to, at some point, look out the front, but you’ve got to know where you were before.
What I liked about the approach was the idea that we’ve already gotten to a place where we’re clear of it. Now, having said that, within my own family, I have some very interesting dynamics. My mom is white, my dad’s black, I’ve got a gay aunt, I’ve got a Trumper aunt, I’ve got Asian, I’ve got East Indian, I’ve got everybody in our family tree. And so it’s forced me, as a human being, to love with bigger arms.
What that means is that when I’m casting, like I did New Jack City, I wanted kids to say no. I made sure we had multiracial roles to say yes to. The new Western I just did, that it’s populated with everyone from Edward James Olmos to John Carroll Lynch to M. Emmett Walsh to Whoopi Goldberg. I love to paint with all the colors in my work.
I guess in some ways in my nuclear family, I don’t know, we sort of ended racism. And the issues we have with each other, issues you would have with your family, your mom, your dad, all that stuff that comes with that, but it’s not race-based. So in my own nuclear family, we overcame racism, as much as one can.
Here I wanted to share with you, if you can see it, this white woman in the middle, that’s my grandmother. That’s Becky Marx. That’s my mother’s mother. These people around her, these gentlemen around her are with the NAACP. On the white side of my family, my grandmother went to Bryn Mawr, sued the school system in Virginia where my mom was going to school, in saying that her white kids were not having a full education and being denied a full education because they were not allowed to go to school with kids of color.
She sued the school system, and won, from the white perspective. The KKK burnt a cross on my grandmother’s lawn and said, “We hope your daughters marry niggers.” She said, “Thank you. One already has.” So I have some pretty radical folks on the white side and on the black side. In my own family, generationally as much as anyone can end anything, we sort of overcame these things and have a sense of humor with it.
I grew up not even understanding, really, there was different race. In my own life, when I was a kid, I was born in Mexico, and I’ll tell you why that is later. We lived all through Europe and Ibiza. My parents were sort of hippie beatniks, pre-hippie beatnik, and they were traveling. They weren’t materialistic, so I slept in the bathtub sometimes. My sister slept in the closet sometimes. They were two young people. My dad was 26, my mom was 22, and they traveled all over the world.
And so early on what we saw was that folks in Morocco have a different concept about what the good life is, what the right life is. Every culture has their own cultural commercial about what does a good man do, what does a good woman do, what does a good kid do? And depending on the socioeconomic status of that family, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I got to see early on that white folks who had a British accent looked like white folks who had an Irish accent, and yet they were at war with each other. That white folks who are from Ukraine look a lot like white folks from Russia, and yet they’re at war with each other. That Black folks in one tribe in Africa might look like the other tribe, there’s no color difference, but they’ll be at war with each other.
As a kid, seeing that early on, I saw that we had a tendency towards global tribalism. As my dad said, “No matter where you go, wherever there’s people, there’s poo.” There’s going to be some kind of poo. Where there’s people, there’s going to be some kind of poo. There’s some tendency towards the -ism, racism, lookism, sexism, classism. It doesn’t mean you deny the existence of that -ism, but you don’t let it poison you personally. You recognize that if we were all purple, I’d probably be, “We’re East Coast purple, we’re the true purple and they’re West Coast purple.”
If you keep it in perspective and don’t make yourself the target of it so that you go, “This is personally against me,” then I think you can see it in a holistic way that allows you to be a better healer. It’s very hard to heal if people don’t feel the love, and that’s all people.
It’s not hard for me get to a place in my zeitgeist, if you were, where I can see that we’re past racism. That doesn’t mean we’re necessarily better to the planet, unless we apply that. It doesn’t necessarily mean that our consciousness changes in terms of gender differences.
Now as Dr. King said, we’re doing the documentary on the King family, I mean on the affiliates of the King family, the grantees, if you will, Dr. King has a great quote. He said, “We either learn to live together as brothers and sisters, or we all perish together as fools.” What Shelly and them are doing in this book is addressing that very core thing.
But what can divide us if it’s not race? We’ll find another way until we get past our tendency for tribalism, period. If we’re all Crips, there’s going to be Bloods. If we’re all Irish, there’s going to be British. If we’re all Protestant, there’s going to be Catholic. We’re going to find the “my club, your club” of it all.
That, I think, once you understand that perspective, you go, “OK, it doesn’t mean we can’t rise above it,” but it shouldn’t poison us to the point where, as I said, we can’t be good healers. That’s a super long answer. I can go on many of these. Sorry about that.
TS: What it brought up for me, Mario, as I was thinking of people whose families have a lot of different members in the family, but the big arms aren’t including everybody. In fact, there’s a lot of divisiveness, and people within the family who are being left out and excluded, and the humor’s not there. Instead, it’s war right within the family.
I’m curious if you could share from what sounds like a very open and accepting and loving family environment, what you might be able to share in terms of counsel or wisdom on how to cross the divide within families when that’s not the case.
MVP: I think a big part of it, of being a parent, of being a child is, but especially being a parent, is trying to understand that our kids come through you and not from you. It doesn’t mean everyone speaks the same language that you do, but trying to give them the best. At Christmas, when I give Makaylo something, I don’t give him what I want him to have. I try to give him the best version of what he would want.
I think it’s trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, but really seeing if you can understand them and then know that no matter how loving or understanding or how much humor you have, you’re going to disappoint the people you love, and they’re going to disappoint you on some level. Look, you’re going to disappoint yourself. There’s been times in my life where the Mario I was is not the Mario I wanted to be or where I like to think I am.
And I’ve tried to say, “Can I get the Mario that I think I am, who’s over here, and the Mario I really am to at least be in the same fricking room?” So it’s interesting. I think standing outside your thoughts a little bit and saying, “Are those thoughts really mine or have I inherited those?” We go back to the house metaphor. Have I inherited the mold in that corner? Is that something that I really need to keep? So I think part of it is checking in with self and saying, “OK.” But opening the door for people to say, “This is an issue,” or “How I deal with it?” And then trying to see it outside of yourself, trying not to react to it as the person that may be perpetrating said problem, but the person that’s going, “Oh. How can I be better at that?”
And then you ask yourself this. It’s like if someone brought you something beautiful but it was in a messed-up wrapper, the wrapper was just terrible, would you throw out the beautiful gift because you didn’t like the wrapper? No. But some of the lessons brought to us are brought to us in an ugly way, in a way that hurts our feelings. Do you know what I mean? So if someone comes up to me and goes, “And you got a booger in your nose,” maybe I didn’t like the way they said it, but I might check the mirror before I do my next interview. So without looking at it, then I feel in anything, in your family, in your life, in your career, with your friend group, without looking at any of it, then I think you are locking in. You’re not moving forward. And I think the minute you start to do that, probably with self, first, if you start here, as Michael [Jackson]said, the man in the mirror, if I can start with the man or the woman in the mirror first, then I can spread it out easier.
JMW: Mario, one of the things you’re saying that is really powerful that I am really feeling with this whole element of the book is there’s two sections that we talked about. And in part one of this interview with Tami, we talked about shadow work, which was really looking at the places that we’re othering ourselves and going unconscious and the things in our past that are impacting our present. And then the other piece of this that I want to pull a thread on that you’ve been talking about is this concept that we have in the book called calling forward. It’s one of, I think, our favorite concepts that Shelly and I, honestly, we were shocked that we coined. We started calling it calling forward, and then Shelly and I did all this research to make sure no one else had said it.
And it’s really this concept around “calling out” is something that we hear people do all the time. I’m calling this person out and naming something that they did wrong publicly. Or some people will say, “Oh. Well, it’s better to call in,” which is to do it privately. But what we always find is that when that’s done with shame, blame, or guilt, that it actually just scientifically shuts down the centers of the brain that actually allow for any learning or growth to happen.
And one of the things that I feel so inspired by the way that you’re speaking is there’s this sense and an understanding with everything that you’re talking about, of needing to be able to step back and come at people from a generous place of knowing that there’s more to the story than might be in our own viewpoint. And if we can see and even just give people the benefit of the doubt that there’s something that we may not understand about their viewpoint, of why we think they’re “hitting us” or whatever it is, then we might be able to open the space for conversation. And I think that when we can open those spaces for conversation, it adds to a whole different thing. And so this is what calling forward and the book is all about. It’s like instead of calling out and calling in, we’re calling people forward. Shelly, I don’t know if you want to say anything else about calling forward before we…
ST: I just want to say, basically, if we have a logline for that, it’s inviting people in to something greater. That’s really what calling forward is, into a greater possibility, a better possibility.
JMW: Yes.
TS: All right, Mario. I have a big question for you. We’re in 2050. We’re in the future. We’ve ended racism in terms of Hollywood, filmmaking, theater. What does it look like? What’s the vision? What’s the big dream?
MVP: So I think for me personally, what I would love in the future is that we have found a way to live in harmony with this wonderful planet that we’re on, this spaceship, and spinning around and hurtling around and circling the sun, that we’ve found a way to go. “Oh, wow. OK.” And there’s still indigenous folks who know how to do it, but that somehow, we’ve taken the wisdom of the ancestors and the technology of the future. And we’ve put those two together and said, “How can we get to a place we can live in harmony with nature?”
Because the future may not just be an issue of racial diversity or gender diversity. It may come down to biodiversity. We’re losing entire species that we don’t pay attention to, but we will get impacted at some point by it. The colonizers said, “We inherit the land from our forefathers,” which I always found funny because they weren’t here. And the Native Americans said, “No. We borrow it from our children.”
So I hope we get to a place where we are not owners of God’s green earth, but great stewards of it, a place where we truly treat each other like we’d like to be treated, and a place where we have learned to live in harmony with nature and don’t see ourselves as separate. That’s what I hope for.
ST: Beautiful. That’s beautiful. Mario, we talk in the book about this concept of intraconnection. So not interconnection, but intra. And so the difference really being… and this is a term that was coined by Dr. Dan Siegel… is that interconnection is there’s this one organism and another organism and they’re connecting. So they’re interconnected. And intraconnection is, “No, no, no. We’re all one organism and we’re all just a piece of that one big organism that is like, there’s no beginning or end to me or to you or to…” So it’s this concept of this notion, and we use the term mwe, which is me plus we is mwe. It’s a new word, basically. So is intraconnection. Because really, there is no me and there is no we. There’s just mwe together. There’s mwus.
MVP: And part of it is, we get sold such a strong commercial growing up, whatever that… And the commercial changes every 50 years. Maybe it’s even faster now. So back to the Frantz Fanon quote is that if the best colonizers leave behind the schools and churches to socialize the oppressed to the oppressor’s point of view, what do movies do? What does television do? What do commercials do? What does Instagram and TikTok, how does that socialize us to what we think is the right way or the good way. And so I think part of unpacking some of these things that we maybe think aren’t helpful in other folks… you’re talking earlier about having the big arms with your family… is also looking at what we’re sold.
I remember growing up as I did, traveling a lot, I saw a cultural smorgasbord of humanity. So in Morocco there was this. And here so-and-so did that, and over here they did this. And so I felt like I was at a smorgasbord and that I wasn’t beholden to just any one zeitgeist. I could say, “Well, I like that from… The French do this. I like that. And then in Morocco, they kicked it like this. And then somewhere over here in Africa, they do this.” And so I didn’t feel like there was only one cultural truth.
And I think that’s a big advantage because you’re not as… If you just grow up with McDonald’s and you’ve never experienced Indian food and Mexican food, Ethiopian food or whatever it is, you don’t know that these other things exist.
So I think the more we get exposure to others— you can’t necessarily teach people heart, but what you can give them that can help is exposure. And exposure is right around the corner from empathy. And man, empathy is just down the street from heart.
ST: Amen. Proximity. May we all be in proximity with each other because that’ll teach us to love each other.
TS: Mario, can you share a bit about the new docuseries following civil rights leaders and activists during the upcoming election, and how you see that contributing to this conversation of accelerating the ending of racism in our lifetime?
MVP: We want to, in this particular case, say, “OK. Here’s the problem. Let’s not spend as much energy on that because we know the problem. We know the racism, localism, sexism, classism, the -isms are out there. Who’s doing work on the ground? How’s it working out? How can we help? What’s the plan of action? What’s the positive of this?” And I think that’s where I believe we’ll be spending a good deal of our energies. Who’s doing the work on the ground and how does that impact our lives? And then for the viewer, how can they be a part of it? What’s our call to action? How do we see ourselves?
And there are some wonderful folks who are doing the good work and you go, you want to be with them. So I think that’s my take on it right now. But I’m with Shelly and Dorothy and I and Jillian, and we’re all doing it together, and we are a mixed bag. We’re all racially different. We all have different points of view. And I think we’ll grow from the process as filmmakers, but I think we’ll hopefully make something that is really, really worth seeing. And right now we’re calling it The Beat Goes On, but we shall see what the title will be later.
TS: I’m feeling the magic.
MVP: It’s going to be there.
TS: I feel it, the invitation and opening and space for the magic. Now, Shelly, in the first part of our conversation, you mentioned something that you called the SUSS process, S-U-S-S. And you were referring to that in terms of helping people bridge divides. And when I think of the upcoming election cycle, the first thing that occurs to me is this whole sense of division in America. And I wonder if you can share a little bit about that and how we can orient ourselves towards bridging divides.
ST: Yes. Well, the SUSS it out process is just one of many different tools that exist. Again, there are so many different modalities and tools that exist, but we wanted to offer at least one tangible process that people can use to engage in difficult conversations with someone that they view as the other. So the SUSS stands for… It’s an acronym, S-U-S-S: State, Uncover, Synergize, and Select.
And state is basically I’m going to state my surface position, my surface position. And we used, in the first podcast, if we go back to pandemic times, the two opposing groups were vaccinations were for them, “I’m going to get all my vaccinations,” and those who were like, “Absolutely not. I do not want the government putting anything in my body. This is bad.”
And so the surface position of one person might be, “I believe people should get the vaccine.” And the other surface position of the opposing group is, “I do not believe people should get the vaccine.” And we did this exercise, by the way, in real-time when Justin and I were teaching at Esalen. And we had a big cohort, a big gathering of people, and we were doing… And by the way, we were COVID-safe. Everybody was tested. It was all good. We all came out of it well and alive.
Step two is uncover. Uncover each party’s noble purpose. This is the key. What is the noble purpose? What is the deepest concern and highest intention that is behind your surface position? I think that a lot of times we state our surface position. “I believe that abortion shouldn’t be allowed. I think that all guns should be banned. I think that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to get married,” whatever that surface position is. But we don’t do the process of actually digging deep and uncovering, “What is my concern? Why do I feel that way? Am I concerned about something very specific?”
The concern for both of these groups was around health. It was around basically, “I am afraid of getting this vaccine because it could hurt me and it could affect my health in a negative manner.” And the people who were pro were also concerned about health. There was this overlap of actually what it was that their concerns were. And it was so interesting to hear people talking through this because they didn’t recognize that there again was this overlap.
The third step was synergize. Really synergize, bring people together around this overlap, even if it’s just one minuscule point, one tiny, little connection point. It doesn’t have to be seven or eight things. Synergize each party’s deepest concerns and highest intentions into an integrally luminous purpose, an integrally luminous purpose. And that basically just means that the joint purpose gets revealed through the conversation. Both groups want to be healthy and to protect themselves and their loved ones. They uncover this.
And finally, the last S stands for select the decision or solution that best achieves the integrally luminous purpose. So what we had the groups do, who were at each other’s throats initially, we had them actually, after they identified, “OK. This is my luminous purpose and this is where I’m coming from. I’m coming from a place of concern, concern for my family.” “No. I’m coming from a concern for a place for my elderly aging mother.” “I’m coming from concern for somebody who can’t get the vaccine because they have diabetes,” or something.
All of the concerns came up and we asked them to come up with solutions. What are some underlying… Again, looking backwards. “OK. Great. Let’s look back now and think about what conditions need to arise so that we’re not having this conversation. What conditions need to arise?” And Justin, if you want to feel free to tell people exactly what some of those suggestions were. And it was pretty illuminating, actually.
JMW: It was actually a really amazing conversation. And we’re using this vaccine example because I think it’s easy for us to see this in the rear view mirror now. But it was phenomenal because we had these two groups who, like Shelly said, were at each other’s throats. They couldn’t believe that the other person was thinking the same thing. And at the end, they’re literally sitting in a group huddling, brainstorming, excited, saying, “How do we get this to the US government so that we can make a difference?” Because when they realized that they were aligned.
And this is the point that Shelly and I have been making again and again and again, that we also made in the first part of this podcast. Our experience around the world, especially around the United States, is that the majority of people are on the same page. We have been taught to believe that we’re all way more extreme about things than we really are from all the people we’ve met around the world, and including my family, who… Mario, we share this. I’m half black, half white. My mom’s side of the family have family who lives in Alabama who are Trump voters. I just spent two weeks at their house in Alabama. They’re the loveliest people in the world, and really so, I had to learn how to live with this.
And I’m making this point to say that at the end of this conversation, what everybody had this aha moment about was they said, “Why are we not putting just as much money and time in the US government towards creating instant, accurate testing that is cheap and effective for everybody, that is just as good if not as the vaccine? Because if we could know for sure that we were tested and it was clear and I was good, I could get this instantly and know that it was good, if we could put that much energy and resources into it as we did as vaccines, where would we be as a country instead of having tests that are half accurate and only work if it happened four days ago and all this kind of stuff?” So it was a really fascinating discovery because they all felt like they landed on a solution that worked for everyone.
And so what I think Shelly and I are wanting to echo here in the SUSS It Out process that Dr. David Gruder created… and the reason we use this is he’s worked with the United Nations and all over the world with this process… is that when we can see that there is actually a commonality, there’s an intersection point behind our statements, which is, “I believe we should be pro-choice,” and, “I believe we should be pro-life.” Those are the statements. When we go underneath what are the reasons behind that that are of highest intentions and concerns, it’s almost 100% of the time that you’ll find an overlap.
And if we can instead of fighting against our differences, fight for the overlap. And with the solutions that can come from there, this is where all kinds of magic starts to unfold, like Mario said, where now there’s space for magic to occur that we didn’t expect. And we found this with people that we talk to across every issue around the world that we’ve worked with, hundreds and hundreds of people around this topic.
TS: Let’s have mwus do a whole bunch of SUSS. Shelly, Justin, any final comments here as we close?
JMW: I just think it’s really beautiful, Mario, how you’re giving us such real life examples of so many of the concepts that we’re talking about in the book. And I just feel so inspired by you bringing this work to the world and how you have been in your family. Your legacy has been bringing this to the world in such a practical and real way, and that we can see how this applies.
And I think the example that you just gave us leads to the very end of our book, which we talked about a little bit before, which was tending to the area of the garden that only we can reach. And you’re doing it through film and with humor. And Shelly and I are doing this with books and mindfulness.
And Tami, you’re doing it through all kinds of ways, but in this moment, through a podcast, but through having all these authors with Sounds True. And everybody listening is doing it in their ways. And if we each show up and do that, we’re going to accomplish anything that we want in this world. And that’s why I feel so inspired by this conversation. Shelly, do you want to close out?
MVP: It’s beautiful like that. If we share a vision, like we’re at a concert, if we all light a candle, then collectively we bring the dawn. We are the dawn.
JMW: Yes.
ST: Oh, yes. Totally. Tami, I just want to thank you for creating such a safe space to have this conversation because that’s definitely an important factor in being able to just have conversations that sometimes can be uncomfortable, or about taboo subjects, or things that we can be skeptics about. And this conversation just whizzed by. So thank you so much for being a great interviewer.
TS: Thank you. How We Ended Racism, that’s mwe and mwus, Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation. It is a gorgeous guidebook. It really leads you right deep, Shelly, as you said, to creating with heart, and Mario, as you echoed so beautifully here, and as Justin, you embody every time I get to connect with you. Thank you all. Thanks everyone for being with us. Sounds True, waking up the world.
ST: Thank you, Tami.
TS: Thanks ,friends.
MVP: All righty.
ST: Thank you. Thanks, Mario.
MVP: Of course. Thank you, Justin. Thank you, Shelly.
JMW: Thanks, Mario.
TS: Thanks, Mario.
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