The Story I Never Forgot

When I was in high school, my best friend was mixed.

Her mother was white and her father was Black.

And she once told me a story from her childhood that has stayed with me for decades.

She and her siblings were at church one Sunday. At some point, they were away from their mother and went to get water. While they were standing there, two older women from the church approached them.

These adults pulled these children aside and told them that because their mother was white and their father was Black, their parents’ marriage was wrong.

It was an abomination.

It was outside of God’s plan.

And because of that, they told these children that they could not get into heaven.

I don’t remember exactly how old my friend was when this happened. But even as a teenager hearing the story, I remember thinking:

What kind of adult does that to a child?

I grew up outside Washington, D.C., in a very diverse area. Interracial relationships weren’t unusual to me. So when she told me this story in the 1990s, I had a very simple explanation for what had happened.

Those women were racist.

They were cruel.

They were ignorant.

And for a long time, that was where my understanding of the story ended.

But when I look back on it now, I hear something else.

I hear certainty.

Where Does That Kind of Certainty Come From?

Those women weren’t wondering whether interracial marriage might be wrong.

They weren’t wrestling with an uncomfortable idea.

They weren’t exploring a theological question.

They knew.

At least they believed they knew.

They believed it strongly enough that they felt morally justified walking up to children and telling them that God disapproved of their family.

Think about the level of certainty required to do that.

And that raises a very different question for me now:

Where did that certainty come from?

Those women weren’t born believing white people and Black people shouldn’t marry.

Babies don’t enter the world with opinions about interracial relationships.

Somebody taught them.

Maybe their parents.

Maybe their grandparents.

Maybe their church.

Maybe their community.

Probably some combination of all of it.

Somewhere along the way, they received a story.

The story became a belief.

The belief became connected to morality.

And morality became connected to God.

Once that happens, questioning the belief becomes incredibly difficult.

Because now you’re not simply questioning an opinion.

You may feel like you’re questioning your family.

Your religion.

Your community.

Your identity.

Your understanding of right and wrong.

Eventually, the inherited story stops feeling inherited.

It just feels true.

The Law Had Already Changed

That’s what makes my friend’s story so important to me now.

By the time she told me what had happened to her, interracial marriage had already been legally protected in the United States for decades.

The law had changed.

But clearly, the story had not disappeared.

Those women were still carrying an understanding of interracial marriage as morally wrong.

And more importantly, they were attempting to pass that understanding to another generation.

That’s what I want to explore in this episode.

Not simply:

Are you racist?

Or:

Are you not racist?

I want to go underneath that question.

I want to talk about the stories human beings tell about one another.

The stories we inherit.

The stories we absorb before we’re old enough to decide whether we believe them.

The stories that eventually become part of our identity and our understanding of the world.

Because laws can change much faster than the stories that created them.

Last Week We Looked at the System

In the previous episode, I talked about slavery not simply as one human being owning another, but as an enormous network.

There were slaveholders and enslaved people, but around them existed governments, businesses, banks, religious institutions, laws, trade, education, labor systems and entire economies.

And for a system like racial slavery to continue across generations, people needed stories that justified it.

It wasn’t enough to say:

Slavery exists.

The society had to explain why it was acceptable.

Why could one group of human beings own another?

Why could their children be owned?

Why could education be denied to them?

Why could families be separated?

Why could one group receive treatment that would have been considered unacceptable for another?

The system required an explanation.

And those explanations became stories about race.

Stories about intelligence.

Civilization.

Morality.

Religion.

Human worth.

Eventually, those stories became embedded deeply enough in society that they didn’t need to be explained every time.

They simply became part of how people understood the world.

Then slavery ended.

The central institution was legally dismantled.

But what happened to the stories that had justified it?

Separation Became More Than a Preference

This brings me back to my friend’s story.

At some point, racial separation became more than a social preference.

It became morality.

People of different races weren’t simply different.

They were supposedly meant to remain separate.

And for some people, that idea became attached to religion.

It became God’s order.

That’s incredibly powerful because once you believe something is divinely ordered, compromise can begin to feel immoral.

You aren’t simply protecting a preference anymore.

You believe you’re protecting what is right.

That same kind of reasoning appeared in the history of interracial marriage in the United States.

For generations, states maintained laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

Those laws weren’t simply administrative rules.

They reflected a larger belief about racial separation.

And when those laws were challenged, defenders sometimes used moral and religious arguments to explain why the races were supposedly intended to remain apart.

That matters because it shows how deeply a story can become embedded.

The law doesn’t exist independently from the culture.

The law can be an expression of the story the culture is telling.

Then the Law Changes

Eventually, interracial-marriage bans were struck down.

The law changed.

But there was no switch inside every person’s mind that changed with it.

People who had spent decades believing interracial marriage was wrong did not necessarily wake up the next morning and say:

I guess everything I believed yesterday was false.

Families didn’t instantly change.

Churches didn’t instantly change.

Communities didn’t instantly change.

The law could move faster than culture.

And culture could move faster than some individuals.

That’s why the experience my friend had was possible decades later.

The legal architecture had changed.

But part of the old story was still alive.

Stories Don’t Have to Stay Loud to Survive

This is where I think things get really interesting.

An inherited story doesn’t have to remain as obvious as it once was in order to continue influencing us.

Sometimes the language disappears first.

We stop openly saying one race is superior.

We stop saying interracial relationships are immoral.

We stop using certain words.

That’s progress.

But does every association underneath the language disappear at exactly the same time?

I don’t think human beings work that way.

Stories can become quieter.

They can move from public law into private expectation.

From something people openly declare into something they simply feel.

Who feels familiar?

Who feels safe?

Who looks intelligent?

Who looks dangerous?

Who looks beautiful?

Who belongs together?

Who belongs in a particular neighborhood?

Who looks like leadership?

Who feels like “our people”?

And eventually, we may not remember that those associations came from stories at all.

They simply feel like observations.

The Meaning Is Something We Added

Human beings obviously have physical differences.

We have different skin tones.

Different hair.

Different facial features.

Different characteristics connected to ancestry and geography.

The physical difference is real.

But the meaning attached to that difference is something human beings created.

A skin tone does not inherently mean intelligent or unintelligent.

It doesn’t mean civilized or uncivilized.

It doesn’t mean trustworthy or dangerous.

It doesn’t mean beautiful or unattractive.

Human beings created those associations.

We attached stories to difference.

Then we repeated the stories long enough that they began to look like characteristics of the people themselves.

That’s a critical distinction.

The difference wasn’t the invention. The meaning attached to the difference is where the human gets involved.

When the Story Starts Looking Like Observation

Imagine two groups of people encountering one another.

At first, there is simply difference.

Then experiences accumulate.

Conflict happens.

Trade happens.

Power changes hands.

Religions collide.

Countries expand.

People conquer one another.

Stories begin forming.

Eventually:

People who look like that are X.

Then the next generation receives the story.

And eventually it becomes:

Everybody knows people like that are X.

That’s when inheritance begins masquerading as observation.

We don’t remember where the conclusion came from.

We simply know the conclusion.

They’re lazy.

They’re hardworking.

They’re naturally smart.

They’re aggressive.

They’re good with money.

They’re dangerous.

They’re submissive.

They’re privileged.

They’re poor because they make bad choices.

They’re wealthy because they’re better at something.

And because the story is old, it can feel like we’re simply describing reality.

We Need More Language Than “Racist” and “Not Racist”

This is why I think we struggle so much with conversations about race.

We tend to have two categories.

Racist.

Not racist.

And those categories are useful when we’re talking about explicit racial hatred or deliberate discrimination.

Those things exist.

They need to be named.

But human psychology contains much more than two settings.

There is hatred.

There is fear.

There is prejudice.

There is stereotyping.

There is familiarity.

There is cultural preference.

There is unconscious expectation.

There is inherited conditioning.

These things can overlap, but they aren’t necessarily identical.

And I think we lose something important when every uncomfortable racial association immediately becomes a referendum on whether someone is a good or bad person.

Because once that happens, most of us become defensive.

We’re no longer examining the thought.

We’re defending our identity.

I’m not racist.

I’m a good person.

I believe everyone is equal.

All of those things may be completely sincere.

But they don’t answer the question I’m interested in.

The question isn’t:

Am I a good person?

The question is:

What am I carrying?

Who Are “Our Own People”?

I had a conversation with a friend that brought this home for me in a very different way.

She had moved from the Washington, D.C. area to a smaller community, and she talked about being glad her children could be around their own people.

That phrase caught my attention.

Their own people.

My first reaction was immediate.

That sounds racist.

But then I tried to stay with the thought instead of immediately judging it.

What did she actually mean?

Maybe she meant people who shared their culture.

Food.

Music.

Language.

Family traditions.

Shared experiences.

There is something deeply human about wanting to feel understood.

There’s comfort in not having to explain every part of yourself.

That isn’t automatically prejudice.

But the phrase still raised an important question:

Who exactly are our own people?

Is it people who share our culture?

Our religion?

Our nationality?

Our family history?

Our language?

Or is it people who look like us?

And if appearance is enough to create a sense of “us,” where did we learn that?

Different Does Not Have to Mean Separate

There is nothing inherently wrong with difference.

Difference can be beautiful.

Different cultures bring different food, music, traditions, ideas, art, spiritual practices and ways of seeing the world.

But human beings have repeatedly turned difference into separation.

Difference becomes unfamiliar.

Unfamiliar becomes uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable becomes suspicious.

Suspicion becomes separation.

And sometimes separation becomes hierarchy.

That doesn’t happen every time.

But it happens often enough that I think it’s worth asking where our own boundaries come from.

When I say I feel more comfortable around “my people,” what am I actually responding to?

Shared experience?

Shared culture?

Or an inherited assumption that people who look different from me are somehow more distant?

I don’t think there is one simple answer.

But I think consciousness begins with becoming willing to ask.

Preference Is Where the Conversation Gets Messy

And this gets even more complicated when we move into attraction and relationships.

I remember watching a podcast where several Black women were given hypothetical dating choices.

The choices involved men of different racial backgrounds and different economic circumstances.

All of the women chose the Black man.

Their explanation centered around wanting someone from their own community and someone who shared their experience.

At the time, I interpreted that very quickly.

I thought:

That’s racist.

But now I think that response was too simple.

Nobody owes another person attraction.

Nobody owes another racial group romantic interest.

Shared cultural experience can matter enormously in a relationship.

Feeling understood matters.

Family matters.

Community matters.

But I also don’t think curiosity is inappropriate.

What shapes our preferences?

What shapes who we consider attractive?

What shapes who feels familiar?

How much comes from personal experience?

How much comes from culture?

How much comes from media?

How much comes from stories about who supposedly belongs with whom?

Again, the goal isn’t to put someone’s attraction on trial.

It’s to understand ourselves.

Where Does Belonging End and Conditioning Begin?

This is the gray space I want to stay in.

Because I don’t think we become more conscious by forcing every human experience into a simple category.

Some things are overtly racist.

Some things clearly are not.

And there is a huge amount of human behavior in between that deserves more curiosity than accusation.

Where does cultural belonging end?

Where does preference end?

Where does conditioning begin?

When does familiarity become exclusion?

When does an inherited expectation begin affecting how we treat someone?

Those questions don’t have neat answers.

But that’s okay.

The point of consciousness isn’t to have a perfect answer immediately.

The point is to become willing to see what is actually there.

Because once we can see the story, we can begin noticing where else it appears.

And one of the easiest places to see these inherited stories is in the stories we create for entertainment.

Who gets to be the hero?

Who gets to be beautiful?

Who gets to be brilliant?

Who gets to be dangerous?

Who gets to simply be a character—and whose identity suddenly becomes noticeable the moment we change their race?

That is where the next layer of this conversation begins.

Hollywood Makes the Story Easier to See

One of the places I’ve become fascinated with these inherited stories is Hollywood.

Hollywood doesn’t just entertain us.

It reflects society.

It reflects what we value, what we fear, what we consider beautiful, what we consider dangerous, and who we instinctively imagine occupying certain roles.

Who is the hero?

Who is the princess?

Who is the genius?

Who is the criminal?

Who is the romantic lead?

Who is the most beautiful woman in the world?

Those images don’t appear in our minds out of nowhere.

We’ve been building them our entire lives.

And sometimes we don’t realize how firmly a particular image has become attached to a role until someone changes the person playing it.

When Representation Changes the Picture

I had a conversation with a woman recently about Halle Bailey being cast as Ariel in the live-action version of The Little Mermaid.

This woman was a redhead, and she explained that she had identified deeply with Ariel as a child because Ariel was also a redhead.

That representation had meant something to her.

So when the character was portrayed by someone who didn’t look like the Ariel she remembered, she was genuinely upset.

I wasn’t interested in mocking that reaction.

I actually understood it.

Seeing yourself reflected in a character can be powerful.

But afterward, I kept thinking about what she had said.

Because if seeing yourself in the hero matters that much, then shouldn’t everyone get to experience that?

If representation mattered to her as a little redheaded girl, then doesn’t that help us understand why representation might matter to another little girl who rarely sees someone who looks like her occupying that same role?

That is where this becomes interesting to me.

Not whether a particular casting decision was good.

Not whether every remake should change the appearance of established characters.

Not whether something is perfectly faithful to its source material.

Those are separate conversations.

I’m interested in what happens inside us when the picture changes.

Who Do You Picture?

Think about Helen of Troy.

Throughout history and mythology, Helen has been associated with extraordinary beauty.

When I say Helen of Troy, what does the woman in your imagination look like?

What happens if the woman playing her is Black?

Does that change something about how you experience the character?

Now imagine a professor.

A princess.

A criminal.

A genius.

A president.

A romantic lead.

Someone appeared in your mind.

And I’m interested in why.

Why can one racial identity sometimes feel invisible within a character, while changing that identity suddenly makes race noticeable?

Again, I don’t believe every reaction to representation is prejudice.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it’s nostalgia.

Sometimes it’s attachment to a story exactly as we remember it.

Sometimes it’s about source material.

And sometimes there may be an inherited story underneath the reaction that we haven’t examined yet.

That’s the part I want to become curious about.

Hollywood Is a Microcosm of Culture

Hollywood gives us a particularly useful place to examine this because everything is right there on the screen.

It’s one of the reasons older movies can sometimes be uncomfortable to watch.

You can see the cultural assumptions of the time playing out directly in front of you.

You can see who was allowed to be the hero.

Who was desirable.

Who was intelligent.

Who was dangerous.

Who was comic relief.

Who existed in the background.

And sometimes we look back and immediately recognize a storyline that people living inside that culture may barely have noticed.

That’s important.

Because it reminds us that our own culture is telling stories too.

We just have a harder time seeing them because we’re standing inside them.

So what happens when we take this out of Hollywood?

What happens when these inherited stories aren’t happening on a movie screen?

What happens when they’re happening inside us?

Change the Player

I want to try something.

I’m going to give you a few scenarios.

I’m not going to change the behavior.

I’m only going to change the person.

And I want you to notice what happens in your mind.

This isn’t a test.

There isn’t a correct answer.

And this definitely isn’t an exercise in self-hatred.

The entire point is awareness.

Because we cannot consciously choose who we want to be if we are unwilling to see what we’re carrying.

Scenario One: The Employee

Imagine a white male employee forcefully disagreeing with his supervisor.

He is confident.

Direct.

Maybe even confrontational.

How do you interpret his behavior?

Assertive?

Passionate?

Disrespectful?

Aggressive?

Now keep everything exactly the same.

Same disagreement.

Same tone.

Same body language.

Same supervisor.

But now imagine the employee is a Black man.

Did anything change?

Not in the behavior.

In your interpretation.

Did assertive become aggressive?

Did forceful become threatening?

Maybe nothing changed for you.

That’s fine.

Maybe something did.

That’s information.

We’re not judging it.

We’re noticing it.

Scenario Two: The Accent

Now imagine someone speaking imperfect English.

What do you picture?

Before you know anything else about this person, what assumptions appear?

What do you assume about their education?

Their intelligence?

Their economic status?

Their profession?

Now I tell you that this person speaks four languages.

They’re a doctor.

Did anything change?

Their English didn’t.

Their accent didn’t.

The only thing that changed was the information you were given.

But suddenly, what you heard as one thing may sound completely different.

That’s fascinating to me.

Because it shows how much of what we think we’re observing is actually interpretation.

Scenario Three: The Neighborhood

Imagine someone walking down the sidewalk in an expensive neighborhood late at night.

Now imagine that person is an older white man.

Who is he?

A neighbor?

Someone taking a walk?

Someone heading home?

Now change the player.

Imagine the person is a young Black man.

Did the story change?

Is he still a neighbor?

Is he lost?

Does some part of your mind wonder whether he’s a criminal?

Again, nothing happened.

He didn’t do anything.

He’s simply walking down the sidewalk.

The only thing that changed was the person you pictured.

And this is the question underneath all three scenarios:

When do we stop observing the person and start interpreting the category?

The Story Doesn’t Stay Inside Our Heads

This is where these inherited stories become much bigger than the weird thought experiments happening inside my head.

Because the story I tell myself about you changes how I treat you.

If I expect you to be dangerous, I may watch you more carefully.

If I expect you to be intelligent, I may listen to you differently.

If I expect you to be difficult, I may have less patience.

If I assume you’re innocent, I may give you the benefit of the doubt.

If I assume you don’t belong somewhere, I may interpret completely ordinary behavior as suspicious.

And once enough people begin responding to people through these stories, those perceptions can begin influencing the conditions of the world around us.

That’s where we get a feedback loop.

A story creates an expectation.

The expectation influences interpretation.

The interpretation changes treatment.

The treatment affects the other person’s behavior.

And then that behavior can be used as evidence that the original story was true.

Imagine a Teacher

Imagine a teacher who has inherited a story about a particular group of children.

Somewhere in her life, she has absorbed the belief that this group tends to be more disruptive.

More aggressive.

More difficult to teach.

She may not consciously believe those children are inferior.

She may sincerely care about every child in her classroom.

But the expectation is there.

So she enters the classroom more alert to disruptive behavior from that particular group.

Now imagine two students doing the exact same thing.

Both interrupt.

Both talk back.

Both challenge the teacher.

One student comes from the group she expects to be difficult.

The other comes from a group she expects to be easier to teach.

One becomes disrespectful.

The other is having a bad day.

Same behavior.

Different interpretation.

Expectation Changes Treatment

Now the interpretation begins affecting what happens next.

The children expected to be disruptive may be watched more closely.

Corrected more often.

Disciplined more quickly.

Given fewer chances.

Offered less patience.

This isn’t an argument that every teacher does this.

It isn’t an argument that every disciplinary decision is racial.

It’s an illustration of how an inherited expectation can influence behavior without someone consciously deciding to discriminate.

Now put yourself inside the child.

Imagine walking into a classroom every day feeling like your teacher is waiting for you to do something wrong.

You feel watched.

Judged.

Distrusted.

What happens?

Maybe you become defensive.

Maybe you stop asking for help.

Maybe you disengage.

Maybe you stop trusting the teacher.

Maybe your grades begin to fall.

Maybe you start acting out.

And then someone looks at the outcome and says:

See?

Those kids really are harder to teach.

The Story Just Created Its Own Evidence

Think about what happened.

The teacher began with a story.

The story created an expectation.

The expectation influenced how she interpreted behavior.

That interpretation affected how she treated the student.

The treatment influenced how the student responded.

And the student’s response became evidence supporting the original story.

That’s the feedback loop.

And that’s what makes these inherited beliefs so difficult to recognize.

Because once the loop begins producing outcomes, the outcome can look like proof.

We forget that our expectation may have participated in creating it.

What Did You Picture?

And there’s something else I want you to notice.

I didn’t tell you what race the children in that classroom were.

Did you picture one?

Did your mind automatically assign a race to the disruptive students?

Again, that isn’t a gotcha.

I’m not trying to catch you.

I’m asking you to notice.

Because our minds fill in empty spaces with the stories already available to us.

And those stories can operate incredibly quickly.

Before we consciously decide what we think.

Before we have time to choose the socially appropriate answer.

Before we even realize there was an assumption.

Now Raise the Stakes

Take that same feedback loop and put it into an environment where the stakes are much higher.

Think about the stories surrounding interactions between Black men and police officers.

For generations, Black people were described using language like savage, primitive, violent and dangerous.

Those aren’t words most people openly accept anymore.

That’s important.

The language changed.

But the question we’ve been asking throughout this entire episode still applies:

What happened to the story underneath the language?

Imagine a Fourteen-Year-Old Boy

Imagine a fourteen-year-old Black boy walking home from school.

He’s not a criminal.

He’s not doing anything wrong.

He’s just a kid walking home.

And on the sidewalk ahead, he sees a police officer.

Neither person arrives at that sidewalk with a blank slate.

The officer has his own experiences.

His training.

Past calls.

Stories from other officers.

Movies.

Cultural stereotypes.

Maybe experiences with genuine danger.

Maybe inherited assumptions.

Probably a complicated mixture of many things.

And in that moment, the officer may not consciously know exactly what is feeding his expectations.

He just notices the boy.

Maybe he starts watching him more carefully.

The Boy Is Carrying Stories Too

But the child doesn’t arrive without a story either.

Maybe his father taught him to be careful around police.

Maybe men in his community told him to keep his hands visible.

Don’t make sudden movements.

Be respectful.

Be careful.

Maybe he’s watched videos online.

Maybe members of his family have had frightening encounters with police.

Maybe he’s experienced something himself.

Whatever the source, he may already have a lower level of trust when he sees the officer.

So he becomes nervous.

Not because he’s guilty.

Because he’s afraid of being interpreted as guilty.

Now the officer notices the nervousness.

The boy notices the officer watching him.

So the boy becomes even more nervous.

Maybe he avoids eye contact.

Maybe he changes direction.

Maybe he becomes hyperaware of every movement he makes.

The officer can’t see what’s happening inside the boy’s head.

He can only see the behavior.

And the behavior has changed.

That change can be interpreted as suspicious.

So the officer watches more closely.

Maybe he approaches him.

Maybe he starts asking questions.

And from the boy’s perspective, something has just been confirmed.

I knew it.

He thinks I’m dangerous.

Two Inherited Stories Collide

Now you have two human beings confirming each other’s expectations in real time.

The officer sees nervous behavior and becomes more suspicious.

The child experiences increased scrutiny and becomes more afraid.

That fear creates more behavior the officer may interpret as suspicious.

And the officer’s response creates more evidence for the child’s belief that police are a threat.

Two stories begin feeding each other.

That’s the feedback loop.

This doesn’t explain away police violence.

It doesn’t excuse misconduct.

And it doesn’t dismiss the genuine danger police officers can encounter.

That’s not the point of the example.

The question is much narrower:

What happens when two people enter an interaction already expecting something from each other?

And what happens when those expectations begin producing exactly the behavior each person expected to see?

Sometimes We Meet the Story Before We Meet the Person

Those two people on the sidewalk didn’t meet as blank slates.

They brought their histories with them.

Their families.

Their training.

Their experiences.

Their fears.

Their communities.

Their culture.

And sometimes stories that existed long before either one of them was born.

That’s what makes this conversation bigger than whether someone consciously considers themselves racist.

Because our inherited stories can influence an interaction before our conscious beliefs have even had a chance to speak.

And that brings us to the part of this conversation that matters most to me.

That fraction of a second before consciousness.

The moment when we decide who looks dangerous.

Who looks innocent.

Who belongs.

Who needs to be watched.

Who looks intelligent.

Who looks beautiful.

Who deserves the benefit of the doubt.

That moment doesn’t necessarily tell us who we are.

But it may tell us what we’re carrying.

And once we can see what we’re carrying, we finally have the opportunity to decide whether we want to keep carrying it.

The Story Still Lives in the First Reaction

This is why I’m not satisfied with simply saying:

Everyone is equal.

I believe that.

I think most people listening to this probably believe that.

But I want to go underneath the conscious statement.

I want to look at what happens in that fraction of a second before we consciously choose how we’re going to respond.

Who looks dangerous?

Who looks innocent?

Who looks like they belong?

Who looks like they need to be watched?

Who looks intelligent?

Who looks beautiful?

Who looks trustworthy?

Who do we instinctively believe?

Who do we instinctively protect?

Those reactions don’t necessarily prove that we’re racist.

That’s not what I’m saying.

They show us where the story may still live.

And if we are willing to look at those reactions without immediately judging ourselves, they can teach us something.

The Law Changes Faster Than the Story

Our attitudes toward race have changed enormously.

Interracial families were once illegal in parts of this country.

Today, they’re ordinary.

That matters.

I’m not arguing that nothing has changed.

It clearly has.

But the law changes faster than the stories that created it.

And that’s the thread that keeps bringing me back to my friend standing in that church.

The law had already changed.

Her parents could legally marry.

But those women were still carrying a story from another time.

A story about race.

Separation.

Morality.

God.

And they were attempting to pass that story to another generation.

That’s why this matters to me.

Because there are so many places in our lives where we move through the world with blinders we don’t even know we’re wearing.

This Is Where the Conversation Becomes Spiritual for Me

When I talk about spirituality, I’m not interested in using it to escape being human.

I’m interested in becoming more conscious of the human experience I’m actually having.

If I want to grow, evolve and become the person I believe I’m capable of becoming, then I have to become conscious of what I believe.

Not just what I say I believe.

Not just what I want to believe.

What is actually influencing my actions?

What stories am I responding to?

What assumptions are operating underneath my decisions?

I believe that we are souls having a human experience.

I believe that we come back for multiple lifetimes.

And because of that, I don’t believe the answer is pretending our human differences don’t exist.

They do.

Race matters.

Culture matters.

History matters.

Our families matter.

The physical bodies we’re born into matter.

The experiences we have moving through the world in those bodies matter.

All of those things become part of this human experience.

So the goal isn’t to erase difference.

The Goal Isn’t to Become Colorblind

For a long time, colorblindness was held up as an ideal.

I don’t see color.

I understand what people are trying to communicate when they say that.

They’re trying to say:

Your race doesn’t determine your value to me.

And I understand the intention.

But I’ve learned—and I continue to learn—that colorblindness isn’t really the goal for me.

The goal is consciousness.

I want to see the differences.

I want to honor someone’s culture.

Their history.

Their identity.

The experiences that have shaped them.

I just don’t want those differences to automatically determine their worth.

I don’t want someone’s race to tell me whether they’re intelligent.

Whether they’re dangerous.

Whether they’re trustworthy.

Whether they’re beautiful.

Whether they’re successful.

Whether they’re deserving of compassion.

Whether they belong.

I don’t want to assign someone a category and then assume I already know everything I need to know about them.

That’s not the person I want to be.

Removing the Veil Means Looking at Ourselves Too

This season is about pulling back the veil on the world we’ve inherited.

But pulling back the veil can’t only mean looking outward.

It can’t only mean examining institutions.

History.

Religion.

Government.

Hollywood.

Other people’s behavior.

Eventually, we have to look inward too.

What did the inherited world leave inside me?

What stories did I absorb?

Which ones do I still carry?

Which ones do I actually believe?

And which ones have been quietly influencing me without my awareness?

I’ve absolutely caught myself acting on inherited beliefs.

I’ve realized that things I thought were observations weren’t always observations.

I’ve even had to question assumptions I thought came from training and assessments I developed during my years in the military.

Sometimes, when I looked underneath them, there was a story.

An assumption.

Something I had absorbed somewhere along the way that I didn’t actually believe when I consciously examined it.

That’s uncomfortable.

It is uncomfortable to find those things inside yourself.

But that is the work.

For me, that’s part of why I’m here.

That’s part of how I grow.

Because if I can’t see what is moving me, I can’t honestly say that I am choosing.

Awareness Is Not the Same as Shame

And this is where I think we get ourselves into trouble.

We notice something uncomfortable inside ourselves and immediately want to categorize it.

Does this make me racist?

Does this make me a bad person?

What does this say about me?

And suddenly we’ve moved away from awareness and into defending our identity.

That’s not what I’m asking you to do.

I’m not asking you to beat yourself up.

I’m not asking you to correct every thought before you’ve even had time to understand it.

I’m asking you to notice.

Because awareness is incredibly powerful.

Awareness gives you choice.

And choice is where we begin separating what we inherited from what we actually believe.

This Week, Change the Player

So we’re not going to solve racism this week.

We’re not going to decide once and for all whether we’re racist or not racist.

We’re going to do something much smaller.

I want you to see if you can catch the story before it becomes action.

For one week, try the exercise we used earlier in this episode.

Change the player.

When you notice yourself making an assumption about someone—especially someone you don’t know very well—pause.

You see their behavior.

You make an interpretation.

Now keep their behavior exactly the same and change one characteristic.

Change their race.

Their gender.

Their age.

The clothing they’re wearing.

Their apparent income level.

Then ask:

Did my interpretation change even though their behavior didn’t?

That’s it.

Don’t correct yourself.

Don’t beat yourself up.

Don’t immediately explain the reaction away.

Just notice it.

Then Ask Where the Story Came From

If something changes when you change the player, become curious.

Where did that association come from?

Was it family?

History books?

Movies?

News?

Religion?

Your community?

Your own experience?

Maybe it’s a mixture of several things.

You may never be able to identify one exact moment when you learned it.

That’s okay.

The important part is that you saw it.

Because once you see the story, you get to ask a question you couldn’t ask while it was invisible:

Do I believe this?

Not:

Was I taught this?

Not:

Have I heard this before?

Not even:

Why did that thought appear?

Do I believe it?

That’s an incredibly empowering question.

Because now you get to choose what happens next.

I Keep Coming Back to That Little Girl

Decades later, I keep coming back to the story my friend told me about those women in church.

And I’ve realized that part of the reason the story has stayed with me is because my understanding of it keeps changing.

When I was young, I saw two racist church ladies.

I saw cruelty.

I saw adults hurting a child.

And those things were real.

But now I can also see something underneath their behavior.

Inheritance.

Those women didn’t invent the belief that interracial marriage was wrong that morning.

Someone taught them.

Someone taught the people who taught them.

The story had traveled.

Generation after generation.

Until it became so embedded in their understanding of morality that they believed they had the authority to pass it to my friend.

They were trying to teach her their version of the world.

Their version of morality.

Their understanding of what God thought about her family.

And that’s how an inherited story survives.

Understanding the Story Doesn’t Excuse the Harm

Understanding where something comes from doesn’t mean excusing what someone does with it.

Those women still hurt a child.

But if all I ever do is call them racist and stop there, I learn almost nothing about how that belief reached them.

And if I don’t understand how a story moves from generation to generation, how do I recognize when another version of it reaches me?

That’s why I’m interested in going underneath these things.

Not to excuse them.

To understand them.

Because understanding gives us a chance to interrupt them.

Some Wounds Aren’t Healed Just Because We Stopped Looking at Them

There are people who hear conversations like this and wonder why we keep bringing up race.

Why keep picking at the wound?

Why not let it heal?

But I’m not interested in picking at wounds that have already healed.

I’m interested in the wounds we’re still carrying without realizing they’re there.

The ones that still influence our reactions.

Our relationships.

Our expectations.

The way we interpret one another.

If a story is still affecting how we treat people, then the wound isn’t irrelevant simply because the original law disappeared.

And I believe the way forward is awareness.

Not guilt.

Not shame.

Not pretending the past didn’t happen.

Awareness.

Then conscious choice.

We Inherited an Entire Library

None of us entered this world with a blank cultural slate.

We inherited stories about race.

Gender.

Religion.

Money.

Success.

Beauty.

Morality.

Family.

Love.

Patriotism.

What a man should be.

What a woman should be.

Who belongs where.

Who deserves what.

We inherited an entire library worth of stories before we were old enough to decide which books we agreed with.

And that’s the larger conversation I’m interested in this season.

What happens when we finally become conscious enough to walk through that library?

To pull the books off the shelf?

To actually read what we’ve been carrying?

And to ask:

Is this mine?

Do I believe this?

Does this reflect who I want to be?

We Don’t Have to Keep Passing the Story Forward

We cannot choose what we were originally taught.

We cannot go back and control every story our parents, communities, religions, schools, movies or cultures handed us.

But consciousness changes the relationship.

Once we see the story, we don’t have to automatically follow it.

We don’t have to turn it into behavior.

We don’t have to hand it to another generation simply because someone handed it to us.

That’s the power we have now.

We get to interrupt the inheritance.

We get to decide what continues through us.

Maybe Equality Begins Here

Maybe equality doesn’t start when we stop seeing color.

Maybe it begins when our differences stop telling us stories about each other.

When someone’s skin color doesn’t automatically tell us whether they’re dangerous or safe.

Intelligent or unintelligent.

Beautiful or unattractive.

Successful or unsuccessful.

Trustworthy or suspicious.

Belonging or foreign.

Maybe equality begins when we can see someone’s differences, honor them, understand that they matter, and still recognize that they don’t tell us everything we need to know about the human being standing in front of us.

When we stop letting the category become the person.

When we stop letting the inherited story blind us to the whole human being.

What Do You Actually Believe?

So that’s the question I want to leave you with.

How many ways do we move through the world because we’ve never examined why we do what we do?

How many things are we absolutely certain about because somebody told us a story a long time ago?

How many beliefs feel like truth simply because they’ve “always been that way”?

And what happens when we finally become willing to look?

Not with shame.

Not with fear.

Not because we’re trying to prove we’re good people.

But because we want to become conscious people.

People who can see what is moving us.

People who can distinguish what we’ve inherited from what we actually believe.

People who can choose what we carry forward.

That, to me, is the work.

And I’m going to keep picking at these wounds because I know there are more stories I haven’t uncovered yet.

Next week, I’m going into one that is very near and dear to my heart: women, and the stories we’ve inherited both as women and about women.

Because this world handed us those stories too.

And we’re going to pull back the veil on those next.

Until then, pay attention to the story.

Change the player.

Ask where the assumption came from.

And then ask yourself:

Do I actually believe this?

Because awareness gives us choice.

And once we can see what we’ve inherited, we get to decide what happens next.

Love and light.

Stay grounded. Stay sovereign.