Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 262: Why We're All Suffering from Racial Trauma (Even White People) -- and How to Handle It | Resmaa Menakem

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

It’s easy to think of racism as a virus that lives in your head. But my guest today makes a compelling case that it also lives, in very profound and often unseen ways, in your body. Resmaa Menakem is a therapist and trauma specialist based in Minneapolis. He’s also the author of an excellent book called My Grandmother’s Hands, which people in my life have been recommending to me for years. Resmaa’s work is all about healing our bodies -- and, by extension, our nation -- from racialized trauma. And in Resmaa’s philosophy, racial trauma lives on in bodies of all colors, including white bodies such as mine. Resmaa gives voice to a new lexicon -- terms like “white body supremacy” and “somatic abolitionism” -- and don’t worry, he’ll explain it all as the interview progresses. He will also share practices that bring you into your body. And he has very provocative thoughts about how white people can do their part way beyond the current news cycle. Where to find Resmaa Menakem online:  Website: https://www.resmaa.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ResmaaMenakem Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/resmaa  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/resmaamenakem/  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/rmenakem Book Mentioned: My Grandmother’s Hands: https://www.resmaa.com/store/my-grandmothers-hands-hardcover Check our our new, free collection of meditations called Relating to Race in the Ten Percent Happier app: https://10percenthappier.app.link/RelatingToRace  Other Resources Mentioned: Malcolm X: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X Stamped from the Beginning By Ibram X Kendi: https://www.ibramxkendi.com/stamped-from-the-beginning  Cherry Blossom Experiment: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics Resmaa’s courses: https://www.resmaa.com/courses Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Frontline Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/resmaa-menakem-262 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. Hey y'all is your's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad,

where the memes come from. And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. So before we dive in, do you have anything on your mind you want to discuss or any thoughts about how you'd like to run this conversation? You know what man, I do pretty well just chopping it up and talking and just two people trying to figure things out. That's the best way for me. One of the pieces of feedback I've gotten that I just want to be open with you about is that sometimes as a white male interviewer talking to people of color, I can

revert back into Mr. Ankerman over in intellectual life. That is definitely in my wheelhouse and I just want to give you permission to call me out if you feel me going into that mode. Absolutely. I appreciate that man. I appreciate the gesture. I, if it presents an issue, or it might even present a learning, let's just, let's go with it. All right. I'm game.

Okay. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, we got a really strong show for you today. It's easy to think of racism as a virus that lives solely in your head, but my guest today makes a really compelling case that racism also lives in very profound

and often unseen ways in your body. Resma Menechem is a therapist and trauma specialist based in Minneapolis. He's also the author of a really interesting book called My Grandmother's Hands, which people in my life have been recommending to me for years. Resma's work is all about healing our bodies and by extension our entire culture from racialized trauma. And in Resma's philosophy, racial trauma lives on in bodies of all colors, including white

bodies, such as mine. Resma gives voice to a whole new lexicon. He uses terms like white body supremacy and somatic abolitionism. And don't worry, he will explain it all as the interview progresses. He'll also share practices designed to bring you into your body to do this work. And he has some really provocative thoughts about how white people can do their own part well beyond the current news cycle. Quick audio note, there's a little bit of background noise occasionally during the course of this interview, but it's not too distracting.

So here we go with resma menacum. Great to meet you virtually. I really appreciate your time. You too, man. You too, like I said earlier, I'm honored. I'm honored as well. I was saying this to you before we started recording that I didn't think we're gonna be able

to successfully book you. So that we did is a source of real pleasure. So thank you. A man of color in Minneapolis during these past few weeks that have been to put it mildly turbulent and painful. And I'm just curious to hear how are you? Well, you know, that really is an interesting question because, you know, so I was on a call with a friend of mine yesterday a black woman and I

asked her that and then she paused and she goes, you know, it would be better if you ask me Am I sleeping well? It would be better if you ask me if I'm eating well It would be better if you ask me how am I taking care of myself and breathing? How am I moving my body? How am I continuing with the virus of white body supremacy? That would be better than asking me how I'm doing because we have such a wrote answer to that.

Black bodies have been conditioned not to really say how we're doing. And so for me, I'm not sleeping well. For me, I used to eat three meals a day and since COVID hit and then the murders of sister Breonna and Arb area and brother George Floyd, I'm only eating one meal a day. I don't have a really good appetite.

My, I'm having more pain in my hip area. And so that's the only way I can answer those questions. Now I was like, I could say, oh, I'm doing good, I'm doing good, Dan, you know, just, or I'm not doing it well, but I don't think that quite gets at the impact of what's happening and how it's actually impacting my ability to kind of think through the fog. And so that's my answer. I noticed as I asked the question, you practice what you preach, which is you took a deep breath. Yeah. I could see you. Yeah.

Listeners can't see you, but I can see you kind of checking in right there. They have to have to. The body is where all of this stuff is located. And so I could very easily do the normal kind of performative pieces, but I know as it relates to just the way that I process things, I got to check in first because if I don't, I will get off this call with you and having the experience that I've, that something wasn't quite right or I, or I kind of sold myself out a little bit. And so, yeah. I wonder when you can't sleep. What's on your mind? What's in your body?

I wonder when you can't sleep, what's on your mind, what's in your body in those times? So one of the things I think about is that the, so this society, this society is constructed on one major thing, and that is that the white body is the supreme standard by which all bodies humanity shall be measured. So just my black body being born into the society, there's a degree structurally that this system predicates around the world and here is that my body is deviant from that standard.

And as a matter of fact, my body is non-human and so My sleeping right now is heightened because of how the threat has been presented over the last you know very intensely I mean for 400 years has been presented but for over the last Month two three months. It's been such an intensity that I find myself getting into sleep but then waking up a lot. I did two years in Afghanistan and when I came home, I was selling my wife to stay the other day when I came home,

I came home in 2013. I didn't really land here until 2015 and once I landed, I realized that I couldn't, my body would not let me be settled and comfortable because there's a vulnerability in settling and comfortableness. And so my sleeping keeps waking up and I'm finding that I'm in that space again. I'm in that space where I'm on constantly. I'm doing a lot of overriding. And so it's, yeah, it's rough. Well, I'm sorry to hear that.

I'm not special with this. This is the experience that when I'm talking with black bodies and bodies of culture, what I'm noticing is that this is a constant experience. The sleeping stuff, the eating stuff is an experience that I'm noticing when I'm doing my own podcast or talking with people and stuff like that, that is coming up a lot. So when we talk about race and we try and navigate race, race actually has a charge to it. Race has a charge, it has a speed, it has a texture, it has a weight to it.

And so this is one of the reasons why bodies of culture in general and black bodies specifically don't want to talk to white folks about race because white people don't really understand the level of charge and how that charge actually has a weathering impact on our nervous systems. And because most white people have a very remedial, collectively have a very remedial understanding of race when we inevitably get wounded in that process. And so right now, that experience of black bodies beginning to kind of grapple with the weight and the charge of this and then create

culture that can actually help us heal through it is what we're in the middle of right now. And there's not a lot of sleeping, there's not a lot of settling right now. Can you say more about the term white body supremacy? Because I know, you've mentioned it a few times in the course of this conversation, people will be familiar with white supremacy. Yeah, yeah. In your book, you really talk about white body supremacy quite beautifully, so I'd love to hear you.

Well, Dan, can we do something right quick? Let's just do something right quick. Yes. So just say the term, and I just want you just to check in, before you respond back to me, just allow your body to just kind of notice what comes up when you do this. So just say white supremacy. White supremacy.

Just notice the texture, notice the speed, notice the weight. Now, say white body supremacy. White body supremacy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Just notice that. Now, textually, what did you notice in terms of a difference? This may speak exactly to one of the critiques that resonate with me of whiteness, which is a disconnection from the body, because for me, I didn't feel much of a difference at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's why I said white people got to get together in order to develop culture, right?

Because the culture is the glue, is the, is the sense of time, your sense of space and your sense of self within that. And so just 10% of culture is what we eat, how we talk, that different type of stuff. The other 90% really is your relationship to things, your relationship to time, your relationship to understanding what your kind of culture, what your morings are, right? And so that textual difference has to be built within community, right?

And so whenever I do this, when I do this with white bodies, they answer it the same way you just answered it. The same way. It's because, and if they do come up with something, it's from a different tradition, right? So they say, well, my Buddhist mind tells me, would it go into something, you know, something that is still when you hear it still feels disconnected, right? And so the reason why I say that is that when you say white supremacy, white supremacy, genuflex to a cognitive idea, right? It doesn't land in the body. The reason why I say white body supremacy and I, so there's two pieces. So, so white privilege is something that people say all the time, right? But that's really not getting at the kind of operational components of when we talk about white supremacy. I don't say white

privilege anymore. I say white advantage. And the reason why I say white advantage is that it is an advantage to be born into a white body in a society that's predicated on the white body being the standard of humaneness, right? Before you do anything, before you talk about redlining me, before you talk about killing me with your knee, before you talk, do any of that type of stuff, you are advantaged simply for being born in a white body. You don't have to do anything, you're advantaged by that. And so when I say white body supremacy, I am saying that there is a supremacy

of the white body off top, regardless of identity, right? Regardless if you're Christian, regardless of your Jewish, regardless of your poor, if you're rich, in that particular identity, whatever the identity is that you claim, if you're transgender, if you're all at that different type of stuff, whatever that identity is, you more than likely are at the top of that identity. And so the one reason why I talk about white body supremacy is that I did not create a system that was based on the white body. And particularly, and specifically the white male body,

and even more specifically the white male elite body, right? Which were the producers of this idea. And one of the reasons why they produced this idea is that it serves a self-interest. White people in general have to start asking themselves as if they want to continue to be the consumers of that which was produced, right? And the answer so far has been yes, they want they want to continue to be consumers of that product. And so when I'm talking about what I'm talking about in terms of what I call somatic abolitionism,

I'm talking about making a concerted effort to no longer be consumers of that product, right? And what that means is that there is a whole lot of an anguish in pain that comes with all the years of consuming that product. Right? One of the things that comes with from consuming that product is that part of coming together in community is beginning to work with that, so you can develop a container, so all of that pain and all of that anguish

and all of that rage and all of that hate can actually be metabolized as opposed to continue to blow it through mine and indigenous bodies. I think a lot of well-intentioned white people will hear that and say, well, so how can I have these conversations in a way that won't be exacerbating the wounds, but could actually be helpful? Don't have them with me. Having with other white people.

White body supremacy is a white people's issue. There is nothing that there is no health concern, there is no economic concern, there is no education concern, there is no prison concern, there is no law enforcement concern that will not be exponentially better if white people start to deal with white body supremacy. If they begin to develop a culture, if they begin to grind up against each other, not just trying to be an ally, but actually developing a living embodied, anti-racist culture,

that means grinding up against each other. That means having those and committing to it for the next three to ten years. I believe it's going to take white people at least three to ten years before they even know what's going on as it relates to race because they have not had to navigate it. Most white people can live their whole lives and not have to interact with me. people can live their whole lives and not have to interact with me. And so, so, so, so that means you don't have to actually do the, my very survival depends on understanding race, the nuance, the subtleness, the vibe of it, the image, the meaning making

around it, the sensation quality, all of that stuff. My life and my children's life and my wife's life, it's predicated around that. That is not the same for white folks. So what I would say is, stop trying to talk to me about it and start talking to other white folks about it so y'all can begin to develop a culture that can actually hold dealing with it. You talk about doing the reps for white people need to do the reps and I've heard you say

many very poignant things in my digital stalking of you. But one of them is that white people get uncomfortable and they have the luxury of getting up and walking away, but you cannot do that. Can't do it. Can't do it. I can get up and walk away from maybe that specific incident, but I can't walk away from this. And white people can actually walk away from this.

They can walk away from race. One of the things that Malcolm X said, Malcolm X said is the most segregated time in America is high noon on Sunday, right? White people can actually, in terms of Christian Christian in terms of being in the church, they can actually even segregate and be separate from the idea of race even in their religion. And so when somebody tells me that they're an ally, that's my man ally. I'm a white ally. I'm this and the other. One of the questions that I ask, I'll ask a number of questions, but one of the

first questions I ask is, who are your people? Who are your people? You're telling me that you are an ally. You're making a declarative statement, which white people do all the time. They declare things. That's different in developing culture. Being a white ally is a verb. It's not a declarative statement.

Who are your people? Who are the people that you've cultivated? This idea of living embodied antiracist practices and culture with who is that? And if that doesn't exist, then what you're saying is, is that believe me, believe me, Rosmau, I'm on your side. That's what you're saying. And the evidence suggested I should not do that.

That children being put in cages is part of the evidence. People kneeling on a black man's body when he's pleading for his life to the point where you squeeze the life out of him is the evidence. And so pardon me if I don't believe you, without works, without action, without communal works in action. So that's kind of where I land with that. This culture you're talking about, the somatic abolitionism. Yeah. Somatic abolitionism. Yeah.

I want to hear what that looks like, but it might be also interesting if you're up to it to talk about what the word somatic means. And how that has to do, that soma has to refers to the body. And this all of course goes back to what I believe is one of your core theses here, which is that we're all, no matter what color we are carrying racial trauma. And we can't figure it out. Cognitively, we need to feel it out. Well, not feel it, feel it. Because the word feel has taken on just emotional states. What I'm actually saying is experience it, right?

And when I'm talking about experience, and I'm talking about vibes, and talking about images and thoughts, and talking about meaning making, I'm talking about behavior urges, I'm talking about affective feeling, I'm talking about sensation quality, I'm talking about that and how weight, texture, speed, and charge feeds into that. And so the idea that we're going to, and we've been doing this, right? So people of good will talk about things like, well, we just need to, we need to unlearn stuff

or we need to rethink this and notice all of those approaches are very cognitive, right? Very cognitive. And I believe that those approaches have gone as far as they can go in terms of trying to shift the change. Now what has to happen is that we have to actually get into the body and create culture. And what I mean by culture is the glue that allows me to be able to pick up on something that's going on with you or pick up on something that's going on within my community without

people saying words. This is not just nonverbal. This is the ability to pick up on what is in what I call the dissonance and resonance fields in use your body as a barometer. So, Dan, let me ask you a question. Do you jog or do any type of exercise or music or anything like that? Yes, all of those. Okay, so what music do you do? Like, if you don't mind me asking. Like, do you guitar? I play the drums.

Drums, okay. So, do you remember how bad you sucked the first time you tried to play drums? Well, I still suck. It could be clear. But I sucked a lot worse when I was 10 years old. You suit, I mean, right. But just because you suck, that did not stop you from continuing to get your reps in and

go and go. You suit, I mean? I do. I mean, as with any skill you got to learn the rudiments and I, this as an evangelist for meditation, that is what I'm always trying to say to people you need to go through that awkward stage. Yeah, yeah. And just because you go through the awkward stage, doesn't mean you stop, right?

There's something that drives you to say, no, this is important to me, so I'm going to continue, right? Why do we think that dealing with races any different, right? Why do we think that there should be no process of conditioning and tempering my body to actually be able to contend and hold what it takes to be able to bring nuance? When you were first playing the drums, you would maybe play the note and bang on something. But you did know and your body wasn't conditioned and tempered enough to understand nuance, right? The same thing applies here.

And the killer about it is that white people don't have to go through it. They have so many dodges because the whole structure is built around their comfort. White comfort trumps my liberation. So when white people get uncomfortable, they always know because of the whole structure. So you remember recently where the woman, the black dude who was bird watching, right? And then she started losing it, right? And losing it so much, she didn't realize she was strangling her own dog, right? But she actually did a public service. Why?

Because she laid bare, she laid bare this idea of how fragility, white fragility, is actually brutality, right? It is actually brutality couched as fragilityility right? The trill in the throat, but she made sure that she said there is an African American man here, not a man, an African American man. Why? Because she knew that she had the tip of the spear at her disposal at any time she wanted it. She had an alignment with the system and the structure and police that said that her body was more valuable than that black man's body.

She understood that. The problem is white folks have not created a language to be able to put that on front street and work and grind on each other with that. So what ends up happening is, is that there is a notion of it, right? But you don't say it in polite company. And white people have to get to a point to where they actually are using that as knowledge

as opposed to say, well, that was just one incident, right? That was my white man voice, right? So that was that was that that it was just one incident and white people are really good at going to episodes and episodic things as opposed to structural things, which she was doing was a structural nod to what she knew she had power in and if you asked her about it, she probably could voice it because trauma over time becomes decontextualized, right? And trauma over time that becomes decontextualized

can look like personality in a person. Trauma over time can look like family traits in the family. Trauma decontextualized over time can look like culture in the people, right? And white people have yet to begin to weave in and go in to some of the traumatic things. Listen, most white people that came here to this unseated land, most white people that came here

were fleeing something. Think about that. They were fleeing. Do you think that fleeing stuff that got stuck in the bodies? When you're fleeing something, and Dan, you're reported. Have you ever been, you've been to war zones, right? Yes.

You know what that free energy is like, right? Yes, I'm also a small man. So I was bullied a lot in high school. I know the flee. You see what I mean? The energy from that. You see what I mean? So just because you get a little older,

don't mean that that flea energy, all of a sudden dissipates. You have to do something with that. There's some work that has to be done, right? And white people have created a structure where that work is not even within their purview. It's not even a thing. The only time it becomes a thing is when they see something that shocks them.

And then they say, I didn't know. And black people look at them like they're out of their damn minds. Black people look at them like you, you, and if they are earnest, if the white person is earnest, they say, I really didn't know that what you don't realize is that that actually makes us think you are so dangerous. You are so violently dangerous to me that even if I love you, I won't allow myself to further be brutalized by this. This relationship, if you love me and you are surprised by this out of all of these years, you are dangerous to me.

So when you come up to me and declare that you're an ally, I either think that you are trying to convince me of something or that you are trying to get me to take care of you. Right? And so that's the dynamic that we have not yet. We don't speak the same languages. We don't we don't we don't speak the same in body language. We don't speak the same verbal language. We don't speak the same vibratory language. Totally different languages. But white people always want to come and deal with us as opposed to dealing with white people. So as we continue you and I to discuss how white people can do that work, maybe it makes sense to really define trauma

because in my grandmother's hands, it's truly excellent book, by the way. Oh, thank you, man. I appreciate that. Thanks for writing it. In that book, you really give such a useful and clear description of trauma. And then it leads to many other useful and clear concepts.

But does it feel right to you to start with the trauma? So trauma is basically this. Trauma is anything that happens to you. There's too much too fast too soon, right? Couple with something reparative that should have happened that didn't, right? Trauma is also how the body responds to there's a part of us that knows that. So when something traumatic happens, our body wants to complete something, either a fight or a flight or a freeze, some type of response that got stuck, right?

So basically, my body is responding to what happened to me. Right? And that thing that happened to me can be decontextualized. And then that decontextualization now looks like who I am. Right? And so when something happens, not all bad things that happen to you are traumatizing. Right? happens. Not all bad things that happen to you are traumatizing, right? The trauma is when you get stuck either in the activation of it or in the settling, right? That's the

trauma. We can get stuck in a depressed kind of, you know, you know, a kind of coiling type of place, or we can get stuck in a, I'm always on, I'm looking at, you know, my energy is always right, you can get stuck in one of those places. That's usually when you're talking about some type of trauma effects, right? And maybe times the trauma is not just individual. Like in this time, where black bodies are not sleeping, one of the things that I've been telling a lot of black bodies is this, is that what you're contending with is not just the energy of this moment.

What you're actually contending with is what I call hip, right, H-I-P-P, right? Historical, intergenerational, persistent, institutional, and your personal traumas, whether it be ingestation, whether it be in childhood, whether it be in adolescence or adulthood, right? Those things get coupled together. So something like watching George Floyd, or something like watching Brother Arbery,

the weight, the contextual weight is actually not just that image, is that image plus the historical, plus the inner-generational, plus the persistent institutional, because it's not like that happened. We had grief and traumatic and a horror response to it, and then the institutional stuff stops happening. I'm still more likely to be murdered by a police officer. I'm still

more likely to be let go of a job early. I'm still more likely not to have the wealth accumulation because I didn't have access to FHA loans or were read lined out of a certain age. That's still happening, right? In addition to maybe some own personal traumas. So the weight of it is so much in there is a stuckness quality that can happen with that. The problem is that many times we internalize that stuckness quality as being something defective in us, not what happened to us.

And so in my grandmother's hands, one of the things that I really tried to do was say, look, what we're dealing with is not an individual horror. It may be individual in terms of what happened, but the horror of it and the terror of it is actually historical. The energy of it is actually intergenerational. The energy of it is actually institutional and personal. And the reason why I say that is that I don't want black people and black bodies to walk around thinking that they're defective, they're not. Something happens and continues to happen. And the field of epigenetics seems to be, as you write about, seems to be bearing this concept of inherited trauma. Yeah, exactly right.

So one of the things that's happening is that, so there's a lot of research that's being done in epigenetics, mostly on mice and stuff like that and how 14 generations, the famous experienced cherry blossom experiment all the way down, there's still a reaction. But what I would say is that there are communities of culture that have knownness and have passed this down, indigenous populations on this land on North America always talk quite eloquently about bloodborne memories, right?

And that's the same thing. It's that I may not be alive to tell you that this world that you're living in right now will ravage you simply because you are housed in a body that is deviant. I may not be able to do it. But what I will leave you with is all of the stuff that was happening for me and all of the things that I leaned into and recoil from both things in terms of resource and the things in terms of horror.

And so you may only because it begins to be de-ontextualized by the time you get it five generations later, you just have a notion of it, right? But you don't have the context for it. And so one of the things that I was really trying to do when my book is give it context, that this is the thing that's always been floating around in the back of you, right? These are the flinchings and stuff. It might not actually just be yours, it might actually be your ancestors.

And the cherry blossom experiment you describe, it was in mice, you'll do a better job at this. I'll start it and you'll correct all the errors that I made. As somebody who's such a bleeding heart that I don't eat animals, I didn't love this study, but they basically put mice on a floor that's randomly electrocuted. So they're just hopping around

and feeling unsettled all the time because they're getting shocks at random time. And then they put those, I guess they're all male mice. They didn't put them in with a group of female mice. They had babies. But before the babies were born, they took the male mice out. So there was no communication they had babies. But before the babies were born, they took the male mice out, so there was no communication to the babies.

That's right. And yet, by the way, while they were electrocuting the male mice, they sprayed in the scent of cherry blossoms. That's the best of a big piece. And then those babies that had never met their fathers who had had this horrifying traumatic experience, merely introducing the smell of cherry blossoms made them jump around.

Exactly right. So one of the big pieces about that is that before they started shocking the the male mice, they treated them really well. You know, you had enough food to eat. They was chilling, right? All while the floor is electrified. And then at a prescribed time, they started doing the electrocution, right? And so just like you, if me and you were sitting in the room and somebody starts electrocuting the floor,

we're gonna jump around, we might climb on each other, we might try, what the hell's going on? Right? And so after a while, they started to pump in the smell of cherry blossoms when they would hit that, when they would hit that, that, that electrical current, right? Did that for a couple of weeks, then they stopped doing the electrical current and then just would introduce just a cherry blossom. And it would react the same way as if they were being electrocuted, right? When they took blood samples from their bloodstream, they found that there was more of a presence of cortisol, of a presence of at higher levels, right? Because they had to be on point to think about when's the next thing going to happen, right?

Then when they put them in with the female mice, they bred and then they removed them before they had any connection with their offspring. And when they, when the offspring got to a certain age and they introduced the smell of cherry blossom, they acted the same way that their daddy's acted, right? That's not a defective mechanism. That's a protective mechanism, right? Look, when you smell that now,, that is not whispering in their ear. It is the genetic expression that says, things might be dangerous, this is going to get

turned off, right? And you need to just respond to this stuff in case I'm not here, right? And I'll think about that just in that one generation, that one mouse, just isolate just that one baby mouse. And that one baby mouse now, over time, begins to have children of their own. And then their children have children of their own. And then those children have children of their own and then no children have children of their own

But the notion is still there because daddy never healed he is or you understand what I mean or mom never healed hers So what ends up happening is is that Everybody is is is responding to daddy or mama's personality as if that is daddy or mama not what they got organized around. Now take that what I just said and put a four-year-old white boy at a lynching. Seeing Mr. Johnson who runs the grocery store, Seeing Mr. Mayberry who is the police officer Seeing the mailman the milkman In this doing this heinous thing that is socially sanctioned What gets passed down to that white boy that now become standard?

That white boy now is a judge. That white boy is now a executive and all of that stuff gets passed down decontextualized. And here's the kicker. And now it's in a white body. So that means it's standard. It is the rule, right? That's why we can't just talk about race cross racially, right? Is because all of that stuff has yet to be contended with in white people themselves. And what I take from that is, what that brings me back to is one of the points

that you make really well in your interviews and in your writing, which is why people, myself included, might think about racial trauma as a problem for other people, but we have our own racial trauma. It just doesn't, it's gonna look very different. That's right. And there is everything in the society

is organized around you not ever dealing with that. And you won't need necessarily deal with any requisite repercussions for not dealing with it. That's the thing is that if white people actually start to begin to develop culture around this, they're going to lose something. You are going to lose something. You're going to lose friends. You're going to lose money. You're going to lose relationships. You're going to lose wives. You're going to lose something. You're going to lose friends. You're going to lose money. You're going to lose relationships. You're going to lose wives. You're going to lose husbands. You're going to lose children. You're going to lose status. You're going to

lose something. And that's why most white people don't do it. And if they do do it, they ain't going to do it in order to build culture. They'll do it in order to be woke. They'll do it in order to virtue signal, but they won't do it to build culture. I mean, I certainly know what it looks like to want to have my virtues affirmed, to do what's often referred to as cookie seeking, to want to be seen as a good white person. I have that. I see it. It's coming up even in this conversation. Yep. I see it. It's getting coming up even in this conversation. Yeah, yeah. And let me say this then and you help you help other white people by saying that. Somebody like you who everybody did a song on to see them TV and all that different type of stuff. When you say that stuff and you say, I've even noticed and myself doing it as I'm talking to you right now.

What it does is is that it allows other white people to begin to say, this isn't all of us, how do we, we got to get at this piece, right? We got to work with each other. We can't keep trying to figure this out individually. This is not an individual horror. This is a communal horror. So if you all keep trying to develop individual ways to deal with a communal horror You're gonna keep genu-flecting back to these types of things

So the next thing I want to say that hopefully will be helpful and onward leading As somebody who has a microphone for a living Is that you have described this work as painful as uncomfortable that you have described this work as painful, as uncomfortable, that's all true. And in my limited experience, having done a limited amount of work in this area, but it is also invigorating. And it is also, and I'm not talking about the wokeness points

or the PC points, which is leading little bits of dopamine and not really that substantial, but getting to know yourself is it's profound. Absolutely. And then you're not owned by these horrible little thoughts that you don't want to face of, you know what? I may be friends with so and so. I may be mentoring so and so because I have a white savior thing going on

or I may feel sort of subliminally superior to everybody. I know who has different pigmentation than me. Looking at that stuff that we don't want to look at, actually, and this is important because people operate out of the pleasure centers of their brain. We do what feels good. So what I'm trying to direct myself and other white people to is that this work is meaningful and feels good, even though it sucks on a million other levels. That's exactly right. So here's what I would say, is that you are

absolutely right about what you say on an individual level. What I'm talking about is another level. What I'm talking about is that communal level, that? That yes, it can be invigorated when you start to begin to really look at this stuff and you start to begin to unfold, right? But what I believe is that that fire that what I call the suffering's edge, that suffering's edge, right? Has to also be replicated in a communal sense. Because like I said, what is ailing, wife folks, is not just individual horror. It is also communal. And so, so it's one thing, is one thing to go and learn and do that and get your therapy and do your writing and like, yeah, yeah, I'm getting, I'm getting it. So, whole another thing to sit in front of another person, do these embodied work in these embodied practice.

So you begin to develop a communal synergy and a communal understanding. That's the next level, right? The next level is the communal moving from race to culture for white folks is huge. And you ain't gonna do that by just insight. Insight is not enough when it comes to race. It is brittle. Strategy is brittle in the face of culture. One of the things I think about is,

as horrible as the KKK and the American Nazi party and the bourgeois boys and all of this, it's horrible as they are. If I'm a 13-year-old white boy, they have symbol, they have color, they have story, they have elders, they have song, they have, you see what I mean? They have sense of time, uh, uh a rules of admonishment, rules of acceptance, right? Right? A language, right? A feel, right? Tell me what a white ally has.

A lot of likes on Twitter maybe. Just see what I mean. Nothing to hold at 13-year-old white boy. So if white people are not developing an embodied anti-racist culture, there's nothing to sustain, strategy will not sustain that. Right? You have to actually develop culture. So you've brought me exactly where I was hoping

we would get to in this conversation. So what does that look like? And I really, you sort of detail level, what does it look like for the people listening to this who want to do this work? Who, what does that look like individually and culturally? How would, how do we take this into reality? That's very simple.

Commit three to ten years of meeting with other white bodies, doing the embodied practices, doing the work specifically on race. Do that for the next three to seven years and see what emerges simple. Just that. Most white people won't do that. When it starts to get uncomfortable, when the scheduling starts to interfere with it,

when their yoga starts to interfere with it, when their yoga starts to interfere with it, when they will give it up rather than hold to it. They will rather than get mad at each other, rather than point fingers at each other, rather than dealing with the sexism that shows up in the context of it, rather than dealing with the homophobia that shows up in the context of it, and specifically centered around race for the next three to ten years. Simple.

Do that. I want to talk about those practices in a second, but since you're expressing what lands for me as pessimism about whether white people will actually do this, given the fact that we need to get to yoga class, do you have any hope that we're going to be able to have reconciliation? Well, let's do this. If all it took was for a black man and a black woman to be murdered on TV, we would have started making changes with Rodney King. We would have started white folks would have the epiphanies and having something, something,

shocking that you see, that is not the curative thing, right? So I'm just going by what I've seen, right? My pessimism is irrelevant to the action that white people need to take, right? And I would say I'm less pessimistic. I'm very optimistic in terms of bodies of culture and black bodies specifically. I don't have a reference point for white bodies

with regard to a sustained living embodied anti-racist culture and philosophy. I don't have a reference point. And somebody's gonna write you after we're done with this and they're gonna say, well, what about all the abolitionists that were, you know, abolished slavery and stuff like that? I would ask that you read stamps from the beginning

before you asked me that question because one of the things that brother Kindi talks about a lot is the idea that there's no such thing as a non-racist, right? You're either working to dismantle either working to dismantle the system of white body supremacy or you are not, which means that you're supporting it. So when you talk about the abolitionists, many of them had the underlying belief that all that needed to happen was that black bodies need to be more in proximity to white bodies in order for things to be better, right? The kind of integration type of understanding. But the standard is still the white body, right? Sigregation is like nah, they need to be away from us.

We don't need to be right. But the standard is still the white body. And so for me, that you have to examine those pieces. So it's not so much that I'm pessimistic. It's really more that I'm dealing with reality. I haven't seen it happen. So until I see it happen, I'm not going to jump up and down just because I see a couple police officers take a knee. I'm not going to jump up and down just because I see some white people stand in between black people and police officers. Did any of those white bodies take each other's telephone numbers?

If for the next three to ten years we go make sure that we come together and we go through this and build community. Did they do that? Probably not. So if you don't think that's going to happen, what hope do you have going forward that these wounds can be healed? I don't have any, I don't know about the wounds being healed in terms of cross-racial. I do know that black people and and and bodies of culture in general, what I am seeing is that

they're starting to speak about this differently. What I'm seeing is that bodies of culture are starting to say, you know what? There are, I mean, I've seen so many black people who on TV would normally kind of play the line when you would ask a question about something and they're going full-fledged. What we're dealing with is white body supremacy. What we're dealing with is white supremacy. You've heard that so much now on the air, and I'm sure you have on ABC, you've heard people talking about this, right?

The tonal quality in black bodies and bodies of culture is not the same as it has been, right? And I think that's and I think what's happening is that we've hit this point where we're not looking for white people to, that the old trying to recreate the civil rights movement is not our standard anymore, right? And so the only reason why people are even paying attention to black bodies and bodies of culture right now and talking, actually talking about reimagining the police and that relationship. The only reason is that money was

lost. Buildings burned, right? That there's going to be a, people are going to have to look at how their city and state budgets are impacted by this. That's why people are starting to begin to say, well, we got to look at the, at the structural pieces of this differently is because it costs the white people money and property. And remember, one of the first properties in this nation was me, right? And our relationship changed when we were no longer property. And so the fact is, is that the change that I think will occur will not be because white people are nice and they get it. I think the change will occur is because white people are nice and they get it. I think the change will occur is because

white people are doing their work and black people are saying you better do your work because we are no longer going to be considered structurally by you even though intrinsically and innately I know I am a valuable adequate worthy human being. And so is my wife and so are my children. I know that. Structurally, I'm a monkey. It is why you can see somebody like Michelle Obama and President Obama as talented, as beautiful as they are, be caricaturized as apes.

The anti-blackness weaves through the structural apparatus and institutional apparatus, right? It's always been there. Is resma human? And the answer from America has always been no. So not pessimistic, just very observant to reality. I'll be right back with much more of my interview with Resma Menacom right after this. Hey, I'm Arisha and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich,

where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threatened to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved

out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. You talk about doing the work. I'm really intrigued by this 3- to ten year commitment because the book is loaded up with exercises. Yeah, practices.

I don't believe you use the term meditation, but as somebody who's coming from the meditation world, it's definitely what I would call meditation. But can we talk about what some of these practices are? Absolutely. Absolutely. So one of the reasons why I don't call it meditation or yoga or stuff like that is because I'm coming from my own kind of my own philosophy, my own world view, my own pedagogy. And you can tell in the book, I really tried hard not to lead, not to hold heartily lean into one like, you know, Buddhist or this, that and the other,

because what I know is is that those practices have their own philosophical underpinnings, right? It is not just you do yoga or it is not just that you do meditation. There is a philosophical mooring, the glue that holds all that together, right? And so what I wanted to do is make sure that people had some sense of when I talk about somatic abolitionism, of what the philosophical underpinnings and the cultural moorings in terms of what I believe is important. And so that's why I didn't say, well, just do just yoga practice, do just yoga. Now, of course, there are certain things that are similar

and stuff like that, but I'm coming at it from a particular moring. And so what are the things that I do in the book? One practice is really orienting, right? That's the first one of the first ones I talk about. And reason why I talk about orienting in the book is that our bodies in particular, black bodies and bodies of culture, our bodies have been oriented towards

what could happen or has happened. But a cop driving past me is not just, oh, that's a cop, right? There's a particular relationship that my body has had with police officers or deputized white bodies. And what I mean, deputized white bodies, when you see Amy Cooper, she's a deputized white body. When you see George Zimmerman,

you deputized white body, right? So the deputizing of white bodies, self-deputizing, right? The Lynch mob is a self-deputizing, right? The Linchmob is a self-deputized white body, a self-deputized group, right? And so for me, orienting is like the little bitty, like five second, two second, three second moment, where I notice exits, and notice windows, and particularly as it relates to black bodies, I always say make sure you look behind you

over your left and right shoulders using your hips and your neck. Why? Because in our bodies in terms of the historical pieces, one of the things in terms of African retention is this locking down, right? In our bodies, we couldn't run. If we ran, there was brutality.

If we stayed, there was brutality. So there's this locking in the hips that takes place, right? And so one of the things about orienting is beginning to engage the hips, the vagal nerve, the neck, right? Because those things historically have been played things that I've gotten stuck. And so if they got stuck in my mama, right?

I'd learned from my mother, not just what she told me verbally to do and not to do, but also what she recoiled from and leaned into, right? I also learned from that too. And so that's one of the ways it gets passed out. And what she leans into and recoils from is shaped by the cortisol levels. It's shaped by her mama's mama's mama's daddy's mama's

cortisol levels. It's shaped by the adrenaline levels, shape the all of those things, all of the adrenaline, norip and nephrine, cortisol. Those are only supposed to be in the bloodstream for short bursts of time, right? Well, when somebody is constantly being terrorized, or there are people of constantly being terrorized, there is a higher level of those things in the bloodstream, which causes a weathering effect

on every structure of the body. This is why I start with orienting and stuff like that, because I want people to begin to contend with those pieces so they don't pass those pieces down. So one of the things I have admonished or said to doctors is that black people having high blood pressure and high in diabetes is not just about lifestyle choices. It's not that we eat more pork or hogm more or something like that, right? It's also the weathering effects and daily weathering effects of racism and white body supremacy. The cortisol that actually weathers my cardiovascular system, that actually weathers

my brain, that actually weathers my endocrine system, that actually weathers my muscular skeletal, do you understand what I mean? So that over the course of 400 years, yeah, I might have high blood pressure. Yeah, so if you're not continuing with that, right? And so all of the practices that I put in the book really are about getting the body to begin to notice, resource, even as 4.5 a second.

And then you get another rep in at another point. And you get another rep in and you get another rep in. And then just like playing the drums, you will be able to understand the difference between new ones. Where you place the stick that gives it this kind of sound and where you place the stick and it gives a round sound, right? That happens from practice, from reps.

And what a teacher does and instructor does is that they watch you do it and it keeps instructing you and it keeps instructing you. That's what white people have to do with each other. So they have to witness each other going through this stuff. They have to observe each other going through this stuff. They have to observe each other going through this stuff. Somebody has to be the person that shares so the community can learn from that and then develop culture and develop the nuance and develop the resonance and the dissonance that it takes in order to actually be anti-racist. Because if we can't see what's coming up in our bodies and our minds

high-racist. Because if we can't see what's coming up in our bodies and our minds in these moments, we don't deal with the energies that have been stifled, then we're just going to act it out blindly. That's it. That's it. That's it. And because your body is considered to be standard, right? You set the rules.

So, the rules is to be silent. That's why white people get so uncomfortable when black people are like saying, this is some straight up crap. You are foul and stuff like that. Me, me, right? You know, and it's infuriating because you're not going through any practices.

You're not doing anything culturally. And that has to happen. Because otherwise, I can't trust you. It's going to happen because otherwise I can't trust you. It's going to take some, I'm not going to trust you anyway because we didn't have 400 years it is. But at least if I can see you beginning to actually do your work, there may be a level at which like, let me give you an example. So now, now NASCAR is saying it's illegal to bring the Rebel war flag, right, to bring it to the thing.

Now they're doing it, right? And everybody, notice how good a lot of people are feeling about this. It's just, you know, white people are just so happy. And everybody's, you know, embracing bubble and all that's different type of stuff, right? But if you watch very carefully, what you'll see is also at the same time, people saying, yeah, that's enough. That's, let's, let's go, but when are we going back to normal, right? When are we getting back to the way that things were, right? You're hearing that at the same time. That's the piece that I'm talking about. That's the piece that I'm talking about. When we say go back to the way that things were,

the constriction that happens in black bodies is, that wasn't good for us. You wanna go back and you wanna get things back to normal. That was not cool, right? In conversations, yeah, that yeah that's true but right and so and so for me until white people are able to develop that glue and that synergy with each other I'm not going to sit up here and say that things things things are are changing because I don't I'm not sure if they're changing just because of the new cycle. They may just be changing for the new cycle

I will know a year from now whether or not what we're talking about is a structural change or whether or not it was based on the new cycle I share some of that concern Not just some yeah Barack Obama when he was a senator. He said America goes from shock to trance faster than any other nation on earth. Hey, I never heard that, but let me write that down. That is absolutely true, right? Absolutely true.

So pardon me if I am, if I don't think just because this stuff has happened in such an acute time, that I don't believe that that's actually structural change. We talked about orienting. Can you describe another or several other of the practices that are designed to bring us into our bodies to feel, to experience, sorry, our trauma so that we're not so owned by it?

Yeah. So, another one is a self-touch. Right? Now, some people are going to hear this, and they're going to have a creepy mind. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about that. That's not what I'm talking about.

That's not what I'm talking about. Right. That's not my idea. If you want to do that, that's fine. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm saying that there are parts of the body that show up in ways that really are calling for support, right?

And so something may show up in the stomach, which I call the experience center, something may show up in the chest, which I call the feeling center, and then something may show up in the head, which is the kind of thinking center, right? And so what happens is that when that stuff shows up, many times it shows up as a sensation, as a word, as a speed, as movement, and stuff like that. And so we have been conditioned to kind of override that stuff. What I talk to people about is that don't try the next time that that stuff shows up in your chest, just touch your chest. Now, here's the thing. When I say, touch your chest, I'm your chest. Now, here's the thing. When I say, touch your chest,

I'm not saying Jesus hands, right? I'm not saying God hands. I'm not saying that you're putting something in and you're taking it out. What I am saying is that may be a place in your body that has never or rarely experienced support. Oh, you're doing a supporting it. That's it.

Just take a moment and just allow yourself. Now, you may not experience anything. You may not experience relief and you may not experience any activation. And what I say is stay with it. Something else will happen. Keep getting the reps in. When it shows up, just do it every time, right? And that's the self-touch, right? Now, Dan, are you married?

Dan, in a relationship? Okay, so imagine, imagine you're experiencing something in is landing in your chest, right? And you go to make that move and you just, I don't know what, I'm not putting anything in, I'm not taking it out, I'm not trying to like get rid of it, I'm just something showed up and I'm giving that part of my body some support. Imagine doing that, right? Now imagine your partner putting their hand over your hand as you're doing it. What do you think you might experience with that? That would feel good. That would be support. That's right. That's right there. Right now imagine doing that with a community. So when somebody else does it, you'll experience the anguish and know I don't want you doing it. And stuff that and that and that and that and stuff starts to surface.

People will see it in your face. They'll start to notice, oh, when I get close to Dan like that, this stuff starts to show up. His cadence picks up and now you're developing the glue. You're developing the understanding, the sense of it, right? That's what has to happen for the next three to 10 years. So when you say doing that with a community, you mean in a room with other white people were talking about and touching this this difficult stuff and maybe somebody else puts her his hand on my chest. Yes, right. As uncomfortable as that may be. Yes, right. Or you say they don't just get

up and do it. You don't know how to just get up and like, hey, I'm just gonna touch you, right? Just has to be something that you say, I'm willing at this point to engage in, right? So when you do it, now, being in that room, and you say, hey, Joe, would you mind just hovering your hand, don't even touch me, just hover your hand over my hand, right?

And now all of a sudden Joe has an experience in that moment you're having an experience in that moment you don't have to do it for half hour you do it for five seconds and then say okay Joe that's enough then break and then just go quiet and pause and notice what shows up and then come back and do that again and again and again and again do you understand again, and again, and again, and again. Do you understand what I mean? The language and the embodied language

and the verbal language that you guys will develop outside of that, Joe will develop something because he will begin to see your nervous system on your face. He'll see it in here, in your cage. He'll see it when after that's over, you start to begin to attack Joe, or you start to begin to move away from Joe, right? All of that stuff is happening right then,

right? And you begin to develop something around it as opposed to now going into a room, having a book club meeting, going through my grandmother's hands, and then leaving, and that's it. Right? That becomes an intellectual exercise rather than an embodied practice. And what I'm saying is, at this point, white folks got to start developing body practice specifically around race to begin to work with this stuff. Otherwise, its performance art. It's interesting. I'm keeping my eye on the clock, because I want to protect your time and be respectful

of your time. And I realize that we've touched on about an eighth of the thing that we could have touched on in this interview. And I say that as a compliment. But just in respect to your time and wanted to let you go on with your day, I wanna point out that you not only have the book, but there's also a companion course that's available. Yeah, I have a companion e-course that goes along with the book.

It's at resma.com. There's a pop-up that comes up at the bottom and you can just click that. And then it helps to frame resma.com there's a pop up that comes up at the bottom and you can just click that and then and then it helps to frame what you'll be working with as you're going through the book, right? Mr. Frey E. Course and then I have another course up there like if after you get through the E. Course that the free one if there's and if you want to go a little bit deeper I have some deeper stuff that that people can can begin to kind of work with. I found that people really like the e-course because it's a different way other than just sitting there reading it. It is a different way of kind of processing some of

that. So yeah, that's why I did that. So do that and then do it again for 10 years. Do it again for the next 7 to 10 years. And when I say that, people go, people go, wow, that's a lot of work. And when I say that, people go, people go, wow, that's a lot of work. Okay, I'm 55 years old. I've been doing, I don't get to say that's a lot of, I gotta keep going. I don't get the opt out of this, right? My experience in what I've gone through,

I haven't had any opt out, right? And why people are gonna have to get to a place where they develop ways that they can't opt out. They got to stick with it. Yeah. And also just worth pointing out as my friend, Willie Mack, who's a old close friend of mine, has said, you know, white people need to get used to being uncomfortable. Well, you're describing as it opting in to being uncomfortable to the work, but demographics tell us that we're heading inextrabley toward a country that is no longer majority white. So that is going to bring with it discomfort. Yeah. So, so, so no longer majority white as in white account,

with a body cup, not in terms of power. Right. See, that's the piece. If you're looking at this from a structural lens, you don't get fooled by the idea that America's browning, right? You understand, you have America maybe browning, and the world is brown, right, and browning. And the power, anytime you have somebody like a Jeff Bezos

who's gonna be the world's first trillionaire, you know you ain't talking about a minor thing here. You're, people don't give that up readily. The elite bodies will, rather than give that up, they will hire an army to protect their self-interest. And in America, we've been fooled to believe that we're exceptions to this stuff. We're not exceptions. This presidency has proven that there is no exception. It's the same thing that you see in a banana republic is the same thing that you can see here. If you're not diligent, if you're not diligent, that there are people who are more interested in keeping

control and more interested in having power and more interested in making sure that their self interest is protected rather than the comments. And then there was one more thing I wanted to say, trauma is what happens inside of you when what happened happened. That's another definition of trauma. Is trauma, that's from Gabor Matay. What happens inside of you? Trauma is what happens inside of you when trauma is what happens inside of you

when what happened happened, right? There's a quality, something happened. So when I got raped, not only did I get raped but something happened inside of me when that happened, right? And there's many times when that thing happens inside of you, we don't have a language for it. So we think something is defective in us and it's not. And it stays with you. It stays with you.

And stays with you. Describe as the lizard brain. It is still there. And it's protective. It's not defective. And that's the thing. It is protective, not defective. The results of it can be damaging, dangerous, militants, and potentially cataclysmic.

And, if you can get to the energy of it and work with it, you will find that that energy can also be used for fuel for your transformation. You're because I read something very, as I was, well, listen to the book, as I was listening to the book, I was, I heard it as liberating on a level because if you describe the trauma as something that's, you know, you didn't ask for and you're certainly not summoning it on purpose, and I'm talking now as a white person, it allows you to get out of the cul-de-sac of guilt and shame, which is more, is a bypass of really actually dealing with the thing.

Because you don't have to take it so personally. Right? So I've been born into this system, and I didn't create it, so I can get away from white guilt, which doesn't help anybody. That's right. So let me say this,

when it comes to guilt and stuff like that, white people, white people, this is why I say this has to be culture, is that your guilt and your shame about this has in some ways been protected. It is not a, it is, it is, it is, it is, usually people are, when they're saying that it is a individual thing that they're talking about, right? And what I would say is that your guilt and shame about this and get in and asswaging

it should not be put hand in hand with not having responsibility, right? Is that what we're saying is get in the game. Get in the game, man. You're not even in the damn arena. Get in the game and then see what comes up. But if you're in in the game, or you're outside the arena and you say, do what you need to dribble to ball like that.

Do what you're not even in the reach, shut up. Don't talk to me. It's like, like, that'd be like somebody saying to Jordan, you know, outside the, you need to do, shut up. I'm sitting here. I do a thousand layups. I do 10,000 free throws before every get, I do, I throws before every day.

I work out before every day and you gonna tell me how to do this. You're an idiot, right? And so what I would say is is the white people gotta get in the game. All of the guilt stuff, all of that shame stuff are dodges to developing community. Dodges.

It's a beautiful place to leave it. And I'm going to keep my word and get you out on time. I really, really, really appreciate your time. Thank you for doing this. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. I appreciate you, man. Thank you for giving me the platform.

And you know, this all had to be the last time. Let's let's let's keep chopping it up. You may regret making that offer. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Big thanks to Resma and big thanks as well to the team who work so hard to put this show together on the regular Samuel Johns, our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our producer, our sound designer's Matt Boynton and Anya Sheshik of Ultraviolet Audio, Maria Wartel, is our production coordinator.

We get a lot of input from my TPH, Comrad, Ben Rubin, Jan Poient, Liz Levin, Nate Toby, and of course, shout out to my ABC guys, Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan. We'll see you soon with a freshie. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free

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