Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Hello everyone. This is Matthew remsky with episode 21 of Antifascist Dad. Hierarchy of Bodies with Michelle Cassandra Johnson, an author, activist, racial equity consultant and educator.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: I do not think any of the patterns of behavior that we are witnessing and wrapped up in right now are new. I think they're very old patterns of oppression, patterns based in a hierarchy of bodies and who holds power and can make decisions about who is valid and valuable and worthy of life and access to protections.
And those closer into proximity to power are afforded protections and advantaged.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: You know, I didn't notice until just listening to that right now that there's this bird song in the background of the interview and I think that sort of communicates some of the feeling that we wind up towards.
It's a great conversation with Michelle. I'm really happy to present it. So that's coming up for Housekeeping. You can find me on Blue sky and Instagram under my name and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as AntifascistDad. And the Patreon for this show is NTIFasciousDadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to every part two of the main feed episodes, including this one. So part two of this episode with Michelle is already up there and then in a couple of weeks it'll be released to the wild because I don't want to paywall anything permanently on this educational project.
Also in the show notes you will find a pre order link for the book that this podcast is, you know about and supporting. It's called Antifascist Dad Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times.
[00:01:59] Speaker C: So that pre order link is there.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: One news item before I talk with Michelle? Episode 16 was on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's viral speech to the oligarchs of the Global north at Davos on January 20th. So this was the speech in which Carney appeared to distance himself from the Trump regime and admit that what he called the rules based international order, which was dominated by US Capitol for decades, was always, in his terms, a useful fiction applied unevenly, protecting the powerful while subordinating weaker nations. Carney's speech sounded honest, refreshing, even radical to some, but I argued that it served a classic liberal purpose, which is to reassure elites that capitalism can be stabilized with better optics. Because if that happens, it will stave off revolution and everybody will be happier.
Carney's Davos prescription for avoiding fascist chaos, however, is just more of the same conservative capitalism that accelerates fascist impulses. Tax cuts, deregulation, higher military spending, fast tracked investment in oil AI and mineral extraction. He didn't talk about domestic policy that would support labor unions, wealth redistribution, guarantee employment, strengthen social safety nets. He didn't talk about anti racist and democratic protections. His goal was to show strength through capital mobilization and flexibility to the neglect of social policy.
Now, that speech was six weeks ago and it has been lauded since as a watershed moment in a new multipolar world in which middle powers are now free to withdraw from the American sphere of influence. What Carney left out, however, was how deeply intertwined The Canadian and U.S. military establishments are through weapons sales, surveillance systems and the management of oil resources.
There's a long dirty history there of Canada pursuing what Carney euphemized as values based foreign policies, but which included sending troops and or aid to wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, as well as strikes on Iraq and Syria, and always selling arms to Israel. That was the international rules based order that he was talking about. Those were all the legal and sensible actions in that paradise paradigm.
Now, Carney's omissions might have something to do with why many liberal and even progressive Canadians felt whiplash just recently on the morning of February 28th when he announced full throated support for the American Israeli unprovoked attack on Iran that had begun just hours before and which is today spiraling out of control.
From that statement, it's clear that Carney actually does still believe in and is willing to participate in that fictional rules based order as he recited three main bullet points from the Trump regime. Firstly, that Iran is the principal source of instability and terror in the Middle east, not Israel. Not the fact that there are 20 U.S. military bases in the region.
Not that there's a president who starts an illegal war without the consent of Congress.
About 90 minutes after Carney posted his statement, news broke of the complete obliteration of a girls school in southern Iran, with Now up to 150 casualties currently estimated.
Iran, this is the second point, has one of the world's worst human rights records, says Carney, and must not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons.
So regardless of, you know, the intrigue over whether or not they have a nuclear program or not, or whether the Trump regime actually destroyed it in the 12 Day War in June. Putting that all aside, Canada is siding with the nuclear armed US where almost 2 million people are incarcerated internally, domestically, where the brown shirts are running wild, and if a trans person in Kansas suddenly you're not allowed to drive.
Carney's third talking point, borrowed from the State Department, is that Canada supports Israel's right to defend itself in the face of threats. Because of course launching missiles preemptively is defensive, right? And also nothing should delay paving over genocide evidence and the remains of Gazans to build resorts and soccer stadiums in the new duty free oligarch zone.
When I criticized the hollowness of Carney's Davos speech five weeks ago on this podcast and on social media, I got a ton of blowback, especially on Instagram, from what I only can sort of describe as unimaginative fellow Canadians.
And the blowback was along the lines of, well, at least someone's standing up to Trump. At least we don't have somebody like him in office. We don't have full fascism here.
And my response to that is that in the long run, guys like Carney might actually be worse because when push comes to shove, they support the fascist imperial state, they co sign the weapons deals, they endorse the wars.
And because their job is to make it all look better and more rational than Trump can make it look, they have a really strong chance of perpetuating these systems long after Trumpism explodes.
And this is why I think the most crucial thing for anti fascist parents and caregivers to pay attention to is not necessarily the fascist loudmouths themselves. Because they are reckless, they're dangerous, they're volatile, but they're also obvious.
They are like seafoam or froth on a deeper churn of domination.
Carney, Keir Starmer in the uk, Macron in France. These are the men that attempt to put a caring, paternal face on on the capitalist order.
They are more approachable than anyone in the White House. They will come to your pride parade and they'll staff their cabinets with super qualified women and they'll call it diversity.
They are better models of behavior and masculinity than we would ever get from the right. They might have been a high school drama teacher that was Trudeau. Or a well loved hockey player manager at Harvard. That's Carney.
Everything they do exudes hope and faith and opportunity.
And yet their fundamental and almost religious, I mean certainly pious belief that capitalism will eventually save us if we keep steady on is false.
So turning to my guest Michelle this week, I think it's important to consider Mark Carney's duplicity through the echo of Martin Luther King Jr. S words in Letter from Birmingham Jail.
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in this stride toward freedom is not the white Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who was more devoted to order than than to justice, who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice, who constantly says, I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action, who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom, who lives by a mythical concept of time, and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a more convenient season.
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I first met Michelle Cassandra Johnson at a yoga conference at the Omega Institute. This was a weekend meeting of the Yoga Service Council, which was a loose network of yoga teachers and therapists and community leaders who were committed to accessibility and social justice. Michelle's an author, an activist, a spiritual director, a racial equity consultant and an educator.
And for over 25 years as a racial equity educator, she's worked with large corporations, nonprofits and community groups. She lives in North Carolina with her husband, her sweet dog, Jasper, and a whole lot of honeybees.
Hey, Michelle.
[00:10:51] Speaker C: Welcome to Antifascist Dad.
[00:10:54] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me here. It's very good to see you.
[00:10:58] Speaker C: It's good to see you again. You know, we've spoken before in other contexts today. The topic is anti fascism and how it intersects with your particular expertise. And I wanted to start with maybe the big question, which is there's a lot of mainstream commentary, and I would say alarmism about Trump and the rise of fascism that seems to imply that the systems of oppression and humiliation that he's enforcing are somehow shocking or new. Now, anti racist workers such as you have a different view on that, don't you?
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Absolutely, yes. I do not think any of the patterns of behavior that we are witnessing and wrapped up in right now are new. I think they're very old patterns of oppression patterns based in a hierarchy of bodies and who holds power and can make decisions about who is valid and valuable and worthy of life and access to protections and those closer into proximity to power are afforded protections and advantaged.
And so I've been sitting with this a lot because I've heard many white bodied folks specifically talk about shock to the system in response to what I think is the things that are happening even as I sit with them feel unfathomable. Like unimaginable, even as I know the patterns aren't new. And so I think sometimes people describe what they're experiencing in their nervous system or in their. Within their communities that are dysregulated as shock. And I'm curious about this because I wonder, and I know we'll get into this about conditioning and the way if we're more proximal to power, we might be conditioned to not see ourselves as part of the problem and as implicated in these systems and responsible for what's happening in some ways. And there's this stark contrast between white body people telling me they're shocked about what's happening and all of the bipoc and people of the global majority folks that I'm in community with and work with are not shocked at all. Like, this is a.
Everything we've experienced in the past, the historical patterns, led us to this particular moment.
I mean, I do think there's shock related to a disruption to the nervous system of what is.
What's going on.
But it doesn't shock me that, you know, and it didn't start with Obama. Right. The backlash. It started well before that, but.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Once Obama was elected, I was like, okay, we're in for this big backlash, which I know most people who do the work that I do understood that as well.
[00:13:59] Speaker C: Right.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: And then when Trump ran again and when Kamala ran against Trump, I just thought, what is the universe doing too, with these two forces that seem antithetical to one another energetically? And I thought that was interesting. But I also knew she wasn't going to win. Like, I just didn't have a feeling she would win. So I don't.
The writing was on the wall, as far as I'm concerned. And whiteness, in my experience of it, knows how to organize itself to support upholding what is associated with whiteness. And I'm talking about, you know, the construct of race and whiteness and internalized white supremacy and the desire for whiteness to continue to perpetuate itself as the Almighty, as the purest, as the most divine, if you will. So.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: I didn't feel shocked. I am concerned. I'm distressed. I'm in despair. But shock isn't the word I would use to describe it.
[00:15:03] Speaker C: You know, I'm hearing that there's also a difference, though, between shock as coming out of the blue and shock fitting into a pattern of recognition that you can probably scroll through the images pouring in of ice, rounding up people randomly and blackvanning them without due process and be shocked on a visceral level in that moment. But it's not like it came out of the blue or it shatters any kind of illusion about the country you were living in. So that seems to be a substantial difference.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: That's definitely true. And I mean, deportation is not new. Enslavement is not new. Oppression. Right. These things aren't new. Erasure isn't new. I do think the rapid pace at which it's happening and the way I can consume information about it, that feels new to me.
[00:16:01] Speaker C: Right.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: There is something about. I talk about this all the time, like the flavor of this that feels different. And yet the patterns are not. We've seen this before. Right. Many of us have witnessed this or have it somewhere in our lineage.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: We can. We can relate to this in some way. I also think people never thought these patterns would emerge in this particular way at this time, given the advances people assumed that culture had made. And this shows us a lot about the work that we have to do.
[00:16:31] Speaker C: You know, you used a phrase right up at the top, the hierarchy of bodies. And in one sense, you're using it to describe how there's sort of an overall political system that values some people over others. And we know how that goes. But in terms of this distinction that we're making between who's shocked and who isn't, isn't. You also sort of use that same idea to talk about, depending upon where you are in the hierarchy, you're going to feel this for the first time or it's going to be something that you recognize. Is that fair?
[00:17:03] Speaker B: That is fair. And part of the shock is that at this time, these patterns are touching people in ways that they have not in the past. Right. I've never seen this amount of federal employees who've been fired or so many people I know are being impacted in ways or organizations losing funding in the. If they even speak about DEI or continue to have their DEI values on their websites.
[00:17:30] Speaker C: Right.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: It's. That's what feels different about this time, I think. And that more people realize fascism is coming for us all. And this hierarchy of bodies does affect us all. And those of us who, based on our embodied identities, who've been less proximal to power, we have a perspective about how power works because we have to understand it to navigate and to try to survive.
And I think people who've been in closer proximity to power are now learning that. And I don't want that lesson. I'm not.
I just want to be clear. Like, I'm not somebody who's here. You know, this about me. I'm not here for that. Like, I don't. I wish we didn't have to learn in this way.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: And.
And yet there was something about like the amount of suffering and the shock and then people may be learning from it, but I wish that wasn't the context. I wish. I wish we could learn in a very different way.
[00:18:21] Speaker C: Yeah, I think on that. Not. There's a lot of people who know, for instance, the work of Frantz Fanon and other postcolonial theorists who will talk about Nazism as the imperial boomerang, for example, that actually this is the logical outcome of imperial tendencies that have exhausted their external resource places.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: They can't colonize anything more, so they're
[00:18:52] Speaker C: going to turn on their own working class.
It's such an incredibly resonant and potent idea.
And for me, it gives me a certain amount of. I don't want to say pleasure or schadenfreude, but I'm like, oh, that's how it works. And in that sense, sometimes I'm not so kind as you just were about, like, well, I wish we didn't have to learn this because it's very hard not to feel, well, what did you expect? What did you expect from a culture like this? Right. And to be angry about that.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: It's true. And I am angry. And I talk some about righteous anger. And I just.
Since the patterns aren't new, often I sit with the question of how much does this have to happen before we change? Yeah, So I think that's where I'm coming from. Of. I'm curious about that because everything is falling apart.
We're in the collapse of the. You know, and so is this it? Do we learn now or does it need. I mean, if the patterns persist, it will get worse, which is not to be doomsday, but that's what I imagine. That's a natural consequence of where we are now and where we've been. And so I hear that. And I do grow impatient and angry and because of my nature and that I'm invested in us being free. I think that is part of why I can at times not always extend compassion and have grace and also understand how we've been indoctrinated.
I can look at people and look at the patterns of conditioning and say, oh, this led to that. And so I think I can at times separate people from the way they've been conditioned.
And I have an awareness that we've all inherited these systems and many of us didn't consent to them or consent to participate, and yet we're wrapped up in them. So what do we do now? I think that's where I'm coming from with it.
[00:20:53] Speaker C: Now, you mentioned I've never seen so many federal employees being fired or so many people having to sort of scrub their websites of, you know, quote unquote woke materials or whatever.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: And you know, let's just get it out in the open that for many years that has been your field and
[00:21:11] Speaker C: you have worked in the kinds of anti racism trainings that are now the target of the MAGA movement. And you know, they really use a well crafted cartoon of the discipline as an example of, for instance, white people being trained to hate themselves or to take on the guilt of their ancestors.
But what's the reality of that work on the ground like those complaints?
[00:21:40] Speaker A: Because the trainings that I had been
[00:21:42] Speaker C: to never made me feel that way. I could never really see what the source of resentment was. From your perspective, what was the reality in the room?
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Yeah, this is a great question. And their strategy worked. None of the DEI colleagues that I have worked with throughout the years are in practice now in organizations or corporations.
[00:22:05] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: So their strategy was so effective, none of us are really getting phone calls even in the. I mean, based on why we're here and what we're talking about, I would expect that we would be getting phone calls and consultant gigs to come in and look at culture in this way. Given what's happening within the broader culture, it's almost as if DEI work, I mean, it's happening, but I think it's happening underground in some ways, and we're using different words to describe what we do.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: Let me just pause for one second
[00:22:39] Speaker C: because I think what you're saying is
[00:22:41] Speaker A: that the moral panic that has chased
[00:22:44] Speaker C: your colleagues out of work that is contrived has this other layer of irony to it, because actually this is exactly what's needed to. So we have this causal loop of, okay, if we get DEI people out of the way, then we can impose the sorts of social structures permanently that DEI was actually kind of fighting against.
[00:23:11] Speaker B: Yes. And that makes me think about, and this is not the topic of our conversation, but then we have AI and we have ways that people will be. Are more likely to conform because of a lack of critical thinking skills based on how people use that. And it's easier to control people when they conform and actually are not using critical thinking skills like understanding that race is a construct that white men of property created to create this hierarchy of bodies and so you asked about that. I just think it's all part of the web of what is unfolding and what we're talking about. And it feels like connected with some other systems. It's just.
Is so dangerous I think to make it illegal right to say or to threaten funding by preventing people from using diversity, equity, inclusion, trans. All of these words, ableism that we have been using for many years to describe how we got here and the impact of, of the hierarchy of bodies that we mentioned earlier and the reality in the room, because that was really your question is the all of the work that I've done and the work I've witnessed in dei which hasn't always been called dei, it was anti racism work, right? We changed the words based on culture and also based on what we need to do in the systems we navigate.
And our work was not based in making white bodied folks feel guilty or hate themselves.
That kind of training, which I don't even think exists, but that kind of training actually just creates more resistance and more anger and more of a backlash.
And I think it was such an effective strategy of the right to go after critical race theory and also make it seem as if people of color were pulling the race card that we had constructed race that it was in our minds and to use this tactic to say that we actually were, were demonizing white people or whiteness in this way. And in fact the reality in the room was that our trainings, the ones that I led and have led for 25 years, often have been multiracial, have been a space to raise consciousness and do deep reflection. Have been a place to contemplate our right role based on our social location and identities. Have been a place to meet in affinity spaces as well based on race and some other identities to deepen an understanding of our right role and the actions that we need to take. And also been a space of understanding what solidarity looks like and connection and relationship. And you know, one of my colleagues, Tim Okun, who have worked with for many years, who's a white bodied woman, she talked about, she mentored me for, for years along with some other colleagues as I was training up to be an anti racism trainer. And she talked about this strategy of white supremacy, this tactic of de centering relationship and connection and that's why we focus so much on it in our training work, in our culture shift work. Because if you can fragment people from one another, then again you can make them conform and control them.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Well, I'm not going to ask you
[00:26:45] Speaker C: to slag anybody off, but I have the sense that part of what the Christopher Ruffo target was involved. Exactly that. The kind of training that came from the DeAngelo segment of the population that basically individualized and psychologized racism as a kind of, you know, primarily an internal set of attitudes that you would have to purify yourself from and that you could never really do that. And it was all very sort of confessional and emotive and didn't really have a lot to do in the exposure that I had with forming positive relationships or seeking out solidarity or really figuring out, you know, what do I share with this person on a class basis? Right. Like, how do I actually. How do I actually, you know, how can I. And I mean, maybe your phrase, which you're using quite often of the hierarchy of bodies is really key there because, you know, it fundamentally speaks about how the relationships are organized.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: That's right. That's right. Yes. And something in what you just said made me think about how whiteness operates in that sometimes in the training models that you just spoke about, and I've witnessed this many times, there's. There's this sense of if you, you know, clean or clear yourself of these ways of being, but you said, and you. You can't actually do that, then you will have arrived.
[00:28:26] Speaker C: Right.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: As if this isn't an ongoing practice. Anti racism is an ongoing practice.
[00:28:31] Speaker C: Right.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: That we will be doing forever based on our social location. So I will be engaged in it forever, even though I'm in a black body and I didn't create the system of white. White supremacy or racism.
[00:28:41] Speaker C: Right.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: But I'm deeply affected by it. So I'll be working on the ways I've internalized white supremacy and internalized racism within myself and how that plays out. I also have privileged identities, so I can take that analysis and think about the privileged identities that I embody as well, and what my work is related to that which, again, is ongoing. Right. And I think people think I went to that training and I can check it off the.
The list and it's done. And that's not how relationships work.
[00:29:09] Speaker C: Or I went to that training and
[00:29:11] Speaker A: I felt really bad because I couldn't
[00:29:14] Speaker C: actually see any way out of this conundrum of having had my soul stained by this attitude that I'm not even really aware that I have, but I'm told I am.
[00:29:25] Speaker A: And that's the.
[00:29:26] Speaker C: In the comment threads under the Jordan Peterson videos or whatever, that's what you get is this feeling of, oh, I got personally kind of examined by this particular type of discourse and it felt almost, you know, religious. Or, or I was spoken down to. Or.
[00:29:51] Speaker A: Or.
[00:29:51] Speaker C: And it's, and it's. I don't want to like go over into, you know, navigate, I don't know, defending the fragility of statements like that. But at the same time I think it comes out of not focusing on the, the network of relationships and solidarities that people form.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: I think that's right. Yes. And I mean there is socialization around being a good person.
[00:30:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: And so if people are, if they encounter an experience that pushes on that and, and makes them question like I'm. People rely on I'm a good person.
[00:30:24] Speaker A: They really do.
[00:30:25] Speaker B: An experience where, oh wait, maybe I'm not as good as I thought and it's over personalized, as if they're not part of a system that indoctrinated them and conditioned them to operate in this way and not see their whiteness.
[00:30:41] Speaker A: There's a real conundrum because on one
[00:30:43] Speaker C: hand as a white person, you want to believe in the meritocracy and on the other hand you want to believe that you're blank. Right. That actually there's no identity that you're really coming with because you're the norm. You can't really see it. It's the other people who are other. But at the same time, if somebody tells you, hey, look, you know, you were born on second base or you were born on third base here, that's really, that can be really painful for a moment.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: But it's a conundrum because the other
[00:31:16] Speaker C: part of you wants to say, hey, there's no such thing as my sort of position within society because I'm just here, I'm just who I am, you
[00:31:24] Speaker B: know, as if one is not part of a group. Right. It speaks to how whiteness works in the exact way you describe.
So that folks don't a lot of times, unless there's been some consciousness raised about it, white bodied folks. And I would say this about the identities I embody that are privileged and are in closer proximity to power, that there's. You're an individual, you're not part of a group that moves together and organizes and continues to build itself to keep its status in the hierarchy.
Right. And so I think if that is new information for people, then that's where the. But I thought I was a good person. And you're saying the patterns of whiteness are toxic. Indeed they are. And you are part of that in some way. And the invitation is to look at how and how this has fractured your relationships with other white bodied people, with black indigenous people of color. Right. And then to contemplate, well, what do you do in response to that?
[00:32:23] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: And maybe get stuck though in guilt.
[00:32:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:26] Speaker C: And maybe, maybe to also say, and it probably doesn't feel that good either. Right.
[00:32:34] Speaker A: Because I think one of the things
[00:32:36] Speaker C: that really sort of sank in for me as I encountered the work of people like you is that, you know, it's hard to. There's this great Marxist term to be deracinated or to, you know, to feel like you're so normal that you don't come from anywhere.
And, and
[00:33:02] Speaker A: that can be a source
[00:33:03] Speaker C: of mourning and pain for folks without them being able to acknowledge it.
And if they're told that not only is that sort of emptiness giving this
[00:33:14] Speaker A: weird anxious feeling about what are you
[00:33:16] Speaker C: supposed to do or be in the world, but also it's part of something that's actually harmful, that can be a sort of a double jeopardy, you know, piece of information to encounter.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: I think that's right. I think it's what, it's so interesting because I'm thinking about empathy and connection and the amount of times I have wondered or asked the question where, where do I come from? Because I have limited information about that because of enslavement. So it's this interesting.
That's. It was just interesting hearing. It's true, that is a pattern. Right. And there's pain there. And I wonder what would happen if in spaces there was also an understanding that there's pain from these patterns when people have been taken from their homelands. Right. And enslaved and brought to places and language has been stolen and they've been, you know, I wonder if we could, and we in many ways I think did and have done this work in our spaces to understand the effect on the body and the nervous system and ancestral trauma, the impacts of that. But it's just interesting to think about.
There's a connection point in the pain that is associated with not knowing where one is from, even if the reasons are different. Right. There's conditioning not to see yourself as having a racial identity.
Often the sound white biting folks are conditioned and there's pain related to that of feeling like I'm not part of a group or but now I'm implicated and I don't understand how. And then there's pain for, you know, bipoc folks related to like where do we come from? Where is home?
[00:35:04] Speaker C: Yeah. There's also maybe there can be a conflation between feeling as though you have roots and feeling as though you have community and solidarity. Because it's kind of striking me at this moment that I might know more about my previous three generations than you do. Which is an insane thing to realize because I can, you know, trace this particular name to Poland or I can trace this particular part of the family to Scotland.
And that might not be available to you at all.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:35:36] Speaker C: And, and, and yet I'm the one who, who winds up feeling like, oh, where am I from?
[00:35:43] Speaker B: Isn't that interesting? I just think that's such an interesting point.
[00:35:47] Speaker A: Right?
[00:35:47] Speaker B: Just like, oh, okay,
[00:36:11] Speaker A: So that's it for today. Part two is now up on Patreon, where Michelle and I continue our discussion about what good anti racism training actually is. And spoiler, it's not about shame shaming white people, as MAGA would have everyone believe.
We talk about multiracial multicultural communities rooted in care repair and practical solidarity as natural inoculations against fascism.
And Michelle then talks about her grounding in the black Baptist Church and her current interspiritual path. And she argues that faith or hope in something beyond current systems might be essential to seed a post capitalist future.
And then part two ends with a coda from me on the experience of starting to recognize whiteness. And that'll be an excerpt from my upcoming book.
So that's all for now, folks. Take care of each other.
