Race – Page 4 – Big Topics Blog

February 25, 2014

Reacting rather than Answering

Comedy is often based on quick jabs and rapid-fire remarks. Answering serious questions, however, takes a bit longer.

An interviewer asked Jerry Seinfeld a question: why most of the guests on his Web TV series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee were white men.

Seinfeld got pissed off and rushed headlong into deflecting the question. “Who cares? People think [comedy] is the census or something, it’s gotta represent the actual pie chart of American.”

Many media reports followed suit.

“His job is to make people laugh, not fill quotas.”

He is “entitled to prioritize humor over diversity.”

Don’t forget that Seinfeld has lots of black comedian friends

Why don’t non-white men and women of all colors just create their own shows?

The usual reactive fare.

The conversation could have gone another direction. What would have happened if Seinfeld stopped to ask himself why he thought that 21 of the 25 guests chosen to be on his show had been white men?

The depth of my reaction to Seinfeld’s rant, however, wasn’t about him. It was about me.

I’ve spent far too many years reacting and getting offended when someone asks me a challenging question, especially one that I fear casts me in a light that is diametrically opposed to my stated values.

I may feel justified in my defensiveness, but my response doesn’t make any changes in me or in the world around me.

I am done with that. I am working like crazy to take responsibility for myself, to keep up my curiosity and to remember my commitment for a more just and joyful world.

I wanted Seinfeld to do what I didn’t do for so long.

Listen to the question.

Turn inward and try to stay open, without judgment or shame—both of which will stop us in our tracks. See what honest answer emerges.

Sometimes I hadn’t thought about it before. I was still asleep as to how race (or class or gender) influenced my choices.

Sometimes I was behaving in ways that felt comfortable or familiar.

Sometimes prejudice was lurking in the shadows.

Sometimes though my behavior mimicked injustice in the culture around me, in truth, I was acting justly.

Seinfeld could have stopped to understand his authentic answer underneath his bluster. Likewise, the interviewer could have wondered why his BuzzFeed Brews audience was predominantly white men and women, as the angry Seinfeld had pointed out. For me, I want to know my own truth.

We each get to make our own choices, hopefully after reflecting inwardly.

However, it becomes more complex when the perspective widens from the personal to the culture milieu. In fields like comedy, white males have more access to performances, especially lucrative gigs. The same is true for institutional or political appointments. Or philanthropic foundation grants going to pet projects of the (often white male) donors.

We live in a world with unequal access to power and position. For someone who has access, like Seinfeld, to say that he “has no interest in race or anything else” means that he is still unaware, or doesn’t care, how race and gender continue to unjustly influence opportunities available to equally qualified people.

In 1987 I became a charter member of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. When I saw their first exhibit of women’s art through the generations, I was stunned. Though the quality of the exhibit was equal to any I’d seen in a wide array of museums, I’d never heard of most of the artists. The standard curator’s excuse, like the one Seinfeld used, “if you are funny [or a good artist], I’m interested” doesn’t account for the extensive, high quality art/comedy of non-whites and females that has been overlooked for thousands of years.

Seinfeld, and all of us, have a right to make our own choices. But we live in a world that is still deeply divided. To react, rather than seriously ponder challenging questions, comes at a high cost to us all.

When we can wake up to ourselves and to the world around us, we can notice the rich variety of comedy, art or leadership that comes from the full diversity of who we are as humans. With exposure we can grow to appreciate something more than what comes through others who look like us.

February 3, 2014

Roots and Writing

It matters where my words take root.

I will write anywhere inspiration hits—on a street corner, in the bathroom or while riding (not driving) in a car. I regularly slip off to Alivar Coffeehouse a few blocks away to do a bit of editing or play with an idea. But when I’m writing about big topics dear to my heart, I need a fertile place where my words can take root.

Big Topics at Midnight was born on the road between Portland Library’s Writing Room, Suena’s Coffee Shop and my home desk. But she took root for six years in a bedroom-turned-writing-studio within Rosegate Condominium #18, where blue walls are covered with art and photographs, my laptop perches on a Value Village desk, a candle flickers at my side and the courtyard’s tulip magnolia moves gently in the wind outside my window.

When I first started writing, I was part of a small group of friends scattered across the country who dreamed about bold experiments in community and economic justice. One of those ideas manifested in the co-ownership of Condo #18 as a place of “Hospice-tality.”

Hospice-tality. Hospice and Hospitality. A welcoming condo that intentionally holds places/times of death, either physical dying or, more often, the crumbling of relationships, dreams, habits and assumptions—in a container of love and community. Jan came to calm her anxiety while simultaneously looking a job. Sally came after a beloved relationship shattered. Nothing like grief to water our souls—and my words—and send our roots down deep.

Our group’s dreams for justice, healing and community wove their way into the pages of Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself. As I dove into my past, I realized that some of my cherished memories needed to be grieved and buried.

For example, my pride in Midland High School’s ease of integration crashed when I realized that it had taken fourteen years and the threat of a federal lawsuit before the community obeyed Brown vs. Board of Education’s ruling. In addition, I was horrified to realize that the way desegregation was implemented abruptly closed Carver High School, robbing the black community of a beloved gathering place and bringing an end to decades of school traditions. Meanwhile, my historically white school’s “Midland Bulldogs” remained strong and vibrant. Condo 18 held me while I ranted at the system and mourned all I hadn’t noticed for so long.

In Condo 18, with pen and paper, I also awoke to a lifelong distrust of my innate feminine, intuitive wisdom and how I, along with much of America, had exalted an intellectual, strategic masculine approach as “the best way to do things.” I dusted off these newly discovered roots and began to notice how they had grounded my work even before I noticed them.

Sitting at the computer looking out my office window, I struggled with the ways that “Money [had] Made Howard [and me] Stupid.”^*Waking up to life as it was around class, gender and race disoriented me. I was grateful to be writing in Condo 18, a community space born from a shared commitment, one created to align heart and actions.

Including actions around economics. Money, I’d discovered, sometimes had prickly and convoluted roots.

Money was part of the rich soil of the Condo 18 experiment, as we sought to grow a new economic paradigm. Each of us who stepped into the experiment donated 10% of our savings, knowing that we would be equal owners even though our invested amounts were vastly different. Extra money was donated to other organizations or people doing exciting new projects rooted in economic justice. When it is time to sell Condo 18, the money will flow out into the world in some creative way.

From outside my window, the tulip magnolia waves to me. I wave back. She’s doing her work and I’m doing mine. I sit alone at the computer to write, but even here my solitude is held in community. In addition to the co-owners, members of my creative community have also filled my writing studio: Jen Violi, content editor/friend/word genius extraordinaire, Khara Scott-Bey, intuitive illustrator who drew the perfect image for each chapter and Ann Eames, copy editor/master at putting my spelling, grammar and tense quirks into finished words. My writing studio is full even when I am alone.

Just as Condo 18 itself pushes the edges of the cultural notion of independent ownership, my book doesn’t fit into “normal” categories either. It is a Social Change Memoir. Not pushing-the-blocks-around sort of social change, but root level change of the personal, institutional, national and global. Not just my memoir, but also the personal stories of many of my ancestors, the moon, Hectate and the Eight-eyed Steam Girl. Condo 18 and Big Topics at Midnight shoot down roots that refuse to be contained.

Big Topics. Big Change. Big awakenings. Writing Big Topics at Midnight demanded Big support. When the winds blew and threatened to knock me down, my roots held me firm.

I return to my desk, put my hands on the keyboard, plant my feet on the wooden floor and let the words flow. Condo 18 is the ground that supports my writing journey.

It matters where my words take root, and this is ground I can trust.

^* A chapter in my book Big Topics at Midnight, page 241.

December 12, 2013

A Definitive Guide

Mother told me to define my terms. So here goes …

Big Topics

1. Issues, subjects, matters great in dimensions, bulk or impact, not trendy topics, but those at the heart of the injustice. Melatonin in the skin. Bottom line in the bank. Y chromosome in the cells.

At Midnight

1. The moment between the end of one day and the beginning of a new one.

2. A dark time when most people need or would like to be sleeping.

3. A time when it gets quiet enough to consider the Big Topics, or when one wakes up whether or not one wants to, with Big Topics on the mind.

4. Culturally, midnight marks the moment where the crumbling of the old way meets the unknown—the dawning of a transformed culture or the deepening darkness of environmental and community destruction.

5. Now.

A Texas Girl

1. A young woman born and raised in Texas, the 28^th state in the union.

2. Who I tried not to be within a few years of moving away from Texas in my early 20s.

3. The person I am since I realized I couldn’t run away from my roots.

Wakes Up

1. Emerges from a state of physical sleep, opens one’s eyes and steps into the day.

2. Emerges from a state of slumber or a fog of unawareness induced by assumptions, unconsciousness or limited perspective, and sees other ways of being and embraces bigger picture of life.

3. An action that often leads to more action.

Race, Class, Gender

1. Three Big Topics that have cut through our globe for generations.

2. Topics riddled with assumptions, mostly unconscious and often unhealthy, that must be explored to create listening, learning and partnership building.

And Herself

1. A reflexive form of she

2. In this case, Nancy Ann Mathys Thurston, a fiery, hopeful, determined (also see “stubborn”), loyal, curious woman who has learned she must love all of her parts in order to love others (also see “not as simple as it sounds”).

Mother, you were right. It is good to break things down. I had fun playing with the definition of each part of my book, Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself.

October 14, 2013

Standing in the Gap … Together

I suppose we could stack one on top of each other, the way one piece of my collage illustrates, as one way to “stand in the gap” together. One house on top of another on top of another. It is an efficient use of ground space, even if climbing from one house to another is a bit daunting with my middle-aged knees.

Not to mention my fear of heights.

There are all sorts of gaps or crevasses that cut through our world. We are divided by the color of our skin, how much money we have in the bank and all sorts of stuff about our gender.

I can’t wiggle my nose and make these gaps go away, so I want to get inside them along with others to do the work of love, compassion, justice, equity, spiritual transformation—those things powerful enough to build something new, together.

However, I don’t usually think of standing in the gap together as a stacking game. If I stand on your shoulders and someone stands on mine, we will fill up the gap vertically, but we’ll also be exhausted in the process.

I often feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders without anyone perched up there. I don’t really want you up there, too.

I know that our world is set up to climb ladders. The ladder to success—until you hit the glass ceiling. Jacob’s ladder on the spiritual journey. We’ve tried to build buildings and corporations higher and higher, and our world groans under the weight.

That is not the world I want to help build. I’d rather move with circles or waves or flow. Something more curving, connecting and inclusive. Feminine.

If not one on top of the other, how shall we then stand?

In a circle? Standing side-by-side with linked arms, supporting each other? Is there a way we can share the burden and the gifts?

Playing with images to explore big topics may seem like child’s play, but don’t be fooled. Imagination holds the power to clarify our thinking and propel us to action.

Anyone want to stand in the gap with me?

Drawing by Khara Scott-Bey. Houses photo from my collage box. I explore more about “standing in the gap” in Big Topics at Midnight.

October 9, 2013

Swiss Cheese Woman

Before I can fully embrace the world’s diversity, I need to embrace myself in all of my diversity. Accepting who I am has been quite a journey. I stumble again and again. Below is an excerpt from Big Topics at Midnight where this question came into knife-sharp focus.

“I flew into Atlanta for the next session of my eighteen-month Be Present training on the issues of Race, Gender, Power & Class. Each time I arrived in Atlanta, Kate Lillis picked me up. On the drive across town, we’d catch up on our families and lives, continue to build our relatively new friendship and get to know each other. Just as we pulled up into her driveway, Kate turned and asked me, ‘Where did you grow up?’ ‘Texas,’ I snorted with disgust. The harsh tone of my voice surprised me, but I was too excited to be in Atlanta with Kate to give it any more thought. Until later.

Alone, snuggled under the covers in Kate and Lillie’s guest room, my body was tired, but my mind was wide-awake. I’d loved growing up in Texas, but my world expanded after I moved away at twenty-three. Year by year, I’d broadened my understanding of life. Simultaneously, I grew more self-conscious about my narrow childhood perspective, packaged in Texas-sized confidence.

Almost thirty years after I’d moved away from the land of my birth, under the covers in Kate’s home, I was horrified to realize I’d spent many of those years trying to cut out the Texan parts of me. Around midnight, I also recognized a larger pattern: I’d long been trying to extricate other parts of myself as well.

When I finally noticed that we had more money than many, I was embarrassed by my family’s upper-middle class and, later, upper class status. For a time, I wanted to give my family money away, not wanting to be wealthy in a world where so many had so little. Simultaneously, I wanted to keep all of the options that money gave me.

Likewise, I had recently realized how white my world had always been. As I heard story after story of experiences and perspectives of people with darker shades of skin, I wanted to rip off my white skin and the white-colored glasses that had kept me unaware of signs of racism during childhood and into my adult years.

The glow from the streetlight gave the room an eerie light as I considered other parts of myself that had faced the knife. It wasn’t easy for me to admit being a Christian, either. Jesus didn’t embarrass me, but far too many Christians did. Too often the radical heart of the faith was usurped by traditional US cultural values.

As a strong girl turned woman, I thought I’d avoided sexism. In the dark of night I realized that I’d been largely unaware of the ways I’d absorbed patriarchal beliefs throughout my life. I’d grown to respect my use of reason and logic—the skills honored in my family—and ignored my subtler intuition, gut and heart. I’d slipped unaware into the patriarchal way of valuing only one part of me. In addition, I was disgusted that it took over thirty years for me to discover how slowly liberation had come to my home state—married Texan women didn’t even have full legal rights until the late 1960s.

I felt full of holes, like a hunk of Swiss cheese. So much of who I was brought me shame. Projecting that onto Texas and onto the United States of America at the height of her world power, I tried to increase the distance between myself and the culturally affirmed values I no longer accepted.

Were these holes I’d cut out of myself destined to remain empty forever?”

No, I didn’t remain full of holes. Waking up not only extended the edges of my neighborhood, but it also helped me find my way back home to myself.

In January, I will return to a Be Present National Training Institute on Race, Gender, Power & Class, this time in California as one of the leadership team. This training has been key for me to find my way back home to myself and at home in the diverse world around me. I hope you’ll consider joining me.

*Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself (Portland: Rosegate Press, 2012) page 238, 239.

August 29, 2013

“What is my emotional inheritance?”

That question jumped off the page in Colette Winlock’s book Undoing Crazy.* Earlier in the novel, when “Mama” spoke about her childhood in Love, Texas in the 1930s, I was thrown back into my memories growing up in West Texas in the 1950s and 1960s.

What was the emotional inheritance passed down to me from generations of my white-skinned family living in North Carolina, Tennessee then Texas?

I can still hear Mom’s voice telling me that emotions aren’t trustworthy. “Don’t let emotions detract you from the work to be done.” “Emotions have no place in the Church.” “Responsibility is more important than how you feel.”

I was taught to think critically. To be curious. To study. And yet, we were discouraged from thinking, or noticing, the Big Topics like racism, sexism or classism.

My grandfather O.R. Tipps, an attorney, was direct in a letter he wrote to his daughter, my mother, in 1945—“Social reformers all try to make people equal. They can’t do it, and by trying, they impede the best ones and don’t help the weak ones. However, they usually get worked up into a lather in trying to get some law, or some tradition, or some precedent changed to make each and every person exactly equal.”

What laws, traditions or precedents did he mean? Redlining? Segregation? Black codes? Jim Crow? Lynching?

How much was my family’s emotional inheritance stunted in the clash between our valuing of intellectual analysis of every topic except the big public ones?

Part of us had to go to sleep to live in the face of such a stark contradiction. We were trained not to notice anything that didn’t fit into the official, white-skinned, USA self-image of rock-solid values of democracy and justice for all.

My family was politically moderate, Christian and thoughtful. I never heard my parents make a racist statement or treat individuals disrespectfully based on the color of their skin.

Yet, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called my family to task: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice…Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

My family’s silence spoke volumes, and perpetuated injustice.

The cost of our sleep was profound.

Believing so deeply in law-and-order yet averting our eyes to injustice (or feeling bad, but doing nothing) stunted our emotional inheritance. It is impossible to be profoundly asleep in one area of our lives and be vibrantly alive in the rest of life.

For me personally, I still struggle to notice, then pay attention, to my own emotions. But the cost to my nation is far more serious. How else can we explain our deep sleep to the reality of inequity, injustice and environmental destruction all around us?

I want to leave a different emotional legacy to generations yet to come.

* Colette Winlock. Undoing Crazy (Oakland: Oaktown Press, 2013), 293.

August 16, 2013

Memoir for Social Change: Memoir #5

It is easier for me to develop a theory about racism than it is to keep bringing my behavior into alignment with my values even as my understanding grows about race in my own head and in the world around me.

Last March, Donna Britt (author of Brothers (and me)) and I brought our memoirs to Washington, DC’s Busboys and Poets monthly A Continuing Talk On Race gathering. The question posed to the room full of people was, “ How does telling our personal ‘race stories’ advance a community discussion?”

One of my significant awakenings about race happened when Cynthia Renfro told a story about her mother, Pat, set in 1965 in Dallas, Texas. Hearing about Pat’s encounter with a “White’s Only” sign in a Laundromat jumbled all I had previously believed was true about my home state as a Texas 5^th grader in 1965. I’d never noticed any signs. Where they there, but I hadn’t notice? What else hadn’t I seen?

I’d rarely thought about race as a child, nor noticed signs of inequality.

When I made that comment at Busboys and Poets, Donna reported that she’d been conscious about race every day of her life. Clearly my experience as a white girl was different than the experiences of Donna, Pat and Cynthia as black girls/women.

For all of my teen and adult life, I have held enlightened, progressive beliefs about skin color and justice. That is good. But that was only a first step.

Woven into the birthing of this nation, racism is entrenched within national values, institutions, education, religion and passed on to us from the moment we were born. Our official versions of history are white-washed. It has been easy for white people like me to make assumptions about how race has influenced life in this country based on our own experience and education. Unfortunately, my opinions have often been wrong and led to division rather than equity and justice.

It all comes back to personal stories. Looking again at what I noticed and didn’t notice as a child. Exploring a diversity of historical stories to gain a broader, and more accurate, understanding of history. Noticing those quiet murmurings inside my head, or those exaggerated reactions that seem to come from left field, to see where and how racism has lodged in my body despite my more enlightened values. And listening closely to people with all colors of skin, trying to understand what life has been like for each of us.

We are all complex and paradoxical. Compassion is needed as we uncover the diversity of stories within ourselves and our culture.

The divisions that still scar our world today are too serious for trivial navel gazing. Sharing story, however, isn’t trivial. Awakening to, then transparently sharing, the truth of our lives and experiences is critical to our joint effort of building a more equitable world.

What stories are you willing to share now that will be a gift to those born seven generations in the future?

This is the final in the blog series exploring the diversity of memoirs held in Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class Gender and Herself.

August 6, 2013

What It Means to be White

What is it like for me to have white skin in our world today?

The only time I thought about skin color as a young girl was in the middle of an art project. As a young artist who finally learned that people don’t have purple or green skin, I always looked for the “flesh” colored crayon.
Most of my life has been lived primarily surrounded by other white Americans. This long string of racially homogeneous neighborhoods and social circles kept me blind to the racism inherent in the opportunities and experiences I’d learned to take for granted.

I recently read about the history of whites in Hawaii. It was filled in greed, violence, theft and racism against all non-white peoples, including the native Hawaiians. It is a story that has been repeated in Haiti, Central America and Africa. This is not just history, it is happening today.

Looking at the hard truths of my own story as a white woman is the subject of my latest YouTube video. I have to stand in the paradox of both horrors and generosity of white people and white culture in order to discover what it means to me, personally, to be a white woman. Noticing and diving deeply into my own whiteness has helped me gain perspective on my privilege, our history and our universal challenges as we move forward toward justice.

Are you ready to look at your own life, including the implications of your skin color, and see yourself in a bigger context of truth?

July 30, 2013

I Must Speak: A Time to Break Silence #2

In the process of updating my blogs’ categories and tags, I noticed that I omitted one posting from my series on A Time to Break Silence. And not just a random one, but my most personal blog about the topic. Mistake? Freudian blip? What should I do–just ignore it, add it in to part #3 or send it out now even though it is out of sequence? Obviously, I decided on the latter. Life isn’t always neat and in the right order…

It is terrifying to speak knowing that my vision is limited. I don’t want to appear stupid or insensitive or disrespectful.

Sometime I blurt things out. Come on too strong. Get emotional. Exaggerate.

Big emotions scare me. I resonate with Dr. King:

“… some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night

have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony,

but we must speak.

We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision,

but we must speak.”

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.*

“The calling to speak is often a vocation of agony” for me. Yet I was called to write a book about the hot topics of race, class and gender. I know much more about myself and the world around me than I did years ago. Yet, I still have limited vision.

These fears that bang around inside of me had me quiet for far too long. Since I care about our world, quiet is a luxury I can no longer afford. The times call for us all to step into the fullness of our sight and to speak our dreams and visions of situations where actions and beliefs are out of alignment with that dream.

The challenge goes beyond merely knowing that I must speak what is true for me. I must also take responsibility for what I say and how I say it. Venting my frustration or anger may be needed in preparation for speaking—taking the time to process with a close friend as I work toward my own clarity, for example—but it rarely helps move a conversation forward to speak from my initial emotional reaction.

I need to remember what I know. About myself. About the bigger partnership I seek with individuals and with generations to follow me. About the spirit at the heart of the other, even people with whom I disagree. I want my words to be in line with my own spirit and my vision for myself and the world around me.

What does it mean for me to be in true partnership with myself, with others, with my nation, with generations now and those to come? What is my responsibility to be in conversation, to stop ancient patterns of disrespect or assumptions or behaviors that are part of the power dynamic or beliefs that have done so much damage over the generations?

Now is a time to break silence. Not in the abstract, but daily, speaking what is true for me, always remembering the deeper love that undergirds my life’s work.

Second in a series honoring *Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break Silence, Delivered April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City. The next in the series is titled “Race, Class and Violence.”

June 29, 2013

Getting Naked: Memoir #1

I’m not fond of taking my clothes off in public. St. Francis did it when he renounced his father’s lifestyle and business and ran off into the wilderness. But I’m no saint.

And yet I felt led to write one of the most revealing of books—a memoir. Not just one memoir, like a normal person should write. But multiple, parallel memoirs: personal, family/ancestral, “my people” (white skin, wealthy, Christian, woman, American, and Texan) and even the moon has her say. Most of these push the definition of memoir, yet all come from my experience and find their “voice” through me. All of these “memoirs” speak with an eye to supporting change from the personal to the global levels.

It was a writing task, to be sure. I’ve always written, but writing a book required lots of learning and relearning the craft of words as well as putting myself at the mercy of great editors. Nevertheless, learning how to write a book was the easy part.

Diving back into the nooks and crannies of my life and the world around me was the demanding part. I looked at things I thought were true about myself and the world around me. I was humbled to see how often I was POSITIVE, yet wrong.

Standing in the light, wide awake and seeing things for the first time, was demanding. Sometimes I hid under my mother’s blue afghan. Often I doubted I was up to the task of learning and change. In the end, however, I surrendered, naked as a baby.

That process continues every day.

In her exploration of the fairy tale “Vasalisa the Wise” from Women who Run with the Wolves (page 108), Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about these demands of living an conscious life:

“… watching and comprehending of the negative forces and imbalances both inward and outward. Secondly, it causes striving in the gathering up of will in order to do something about what one sees, be it for good, or balance, or to allow something to die.

“… we clearly see all sides of ourselves and others, both the disfigured and the divine and all conditions in between.

“Yet, with this light the miracles of deep beauty in the world and in humans come to consciousness. With this penetrating light one can see past the bad action to the good heart, one can espy the sweet spirit crushed beneath hatred, one can understand much instead of being perplexed only.”

In the end, getting naked through a memoir was the only structure I found powerful enough to dive deeply into race, class and gender in order to support the great turning that is so needed in our world today.

I’d love to hear your bare stories too. Too much is at stake for us to continue to hide beneath layers and layers of silence.

First in a series of five blogs about memoir.