Welcome back to another episode of The Awakened Heart. This week, Bill de la Cruz and Guadalupe Guajardo decided to give the viewers an extra episode with special guest Kathy Kniep. We hope you enjoy the extra content! Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends.

 

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Origination Point Podcast Race Conversations

The origination point is connected to bias awareness and bias deconstruction. The origination point is the notion that all of our biases, implicit or explicit, have a point in time where they started, where we were given a narrative or had an experience with a small group of people that then we extrapolate to a larger group of people.

The reason why the origination point is so important is because that is the point of healing and understanding. As we are deconstructing and making our biases more conscious, the origination point supports us in understanding where they came from and healing any emotional impacts that they are having in our lives. Sit back, open your mind, open your heart, and let’s see if we can find your origination points to bias.

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I want to talk about race. It’s something that has interested me for years and years and is what I have talked about with a variety of people over the years. That is especially relevant when I see all of the different ways that race is playing a role in our interactions with each other and in how it’s being used as a weapon of fear in terms of being politicized to the point where there’s a lot of people who can’t even have the conversation about race.

At the same time, I’m reading this interesting book. It’s called The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea by Robert Wald Sussman. The basic premise that I’m getting out of it is that there is no science or genetic validity to race and racial disparities in terms of who is a better person or who has the ability to be educated or as smarter or anything like that.

It’s been interesting to me because race is something that is so prevalent in our society. It is a conversation that takes on so many different theories, ideas, and perspectives. It was interesting reading in this book how race started out as looking at things like skull structure. There were theorists and researchers in the 1400 and 1500s who looked at skull size and reasoned about the skull of a White person, the way that it was shaped, and the brain size.

They extrapolated that White people were smarter and more and had more capacity to learn and to be engaged. As it went around the racial categories, Brown people were somewhere in the middle. Black skulls were somewhere at the bottom, and it was rooted in this idea about brain size and skull shape that, depending on your skull shape, was then related to your ability to learn, to be engaged, and to be additive in terms of what’s going on in the evolution of countries.

All these were rooted in these people’s theories. It was mostly White men who created these theories. They were respected in this field, so when they spoke or when they wrote something, much like now with things like the replacement theory, people believed it to be true. We will get into the Great Replacement Theory in a little bit, but first I wanted to talk about how race is a social construct.

The construct of race and the way we see it is a social construct, and it’s being kept alive because we still believe that that’s how we should rate each other. I have friends of all different races. What they tell me and what I would tell you as somebody who’s not White is I want you to see that I’m racially different, and that’s okay.

 

I want you to see that I don’t look like you. I don’t want you to use it as a predicate for how you treat me. The thing that we have done is we have connected all of these stereotypes, judgments, and biases to the race of a person versus looking at who that person is. I have facilitated these conversations in police departments, fire departments, doctors, educators, and nonprofits.

The reason why we are having these conversations is they all know that race plays a role in all of these professions. The important thing that I have found, which is a distinction, is race plays a role in all of these professions, yet it doesn’t mean that everyone in those professions is racist. It means that they have biases, stereotypes, and judgments that if gone unchecked, people believe to be true.

We all saw what happened with George Floyd, and so there’s no mystery that bias in policing towards Black people is different than how a White person is seen in policing. Does that make all police officers racist and horrible? In my opinion, no. Any more than the doctors that I have worked with who know that when a White person and a Black person go into the hospital with the same ailment and a similar number on the pain chart, the chances of the Black patient getting less pain medication goes up because of a stereotype of addictive patterns of drug use that have nothing to do with assessing that individual for their medical needs.

It’s no different in education where across this country, Black males are over-referred to discipline at six times the rate as White males for exactly the same behavior. We could go on and on and talk about how, in real estate, who’s getting loans more frequently than not. It’s White people over Black people. Redlining was a real part of the history of this country.

These are all the ways that racism has been playing out in our evolution as a society over hundreds of years, starting with slavery, the annihilation of the native population, the internment of the Japanese, and pretty much every group in this country, like Italian and Irish, have been discriminated against on some level, either for their race or their ethnicity.

This is something that’s bred into our cultural and generational history. It’s something that’s real for all of us. In the 1700s when the census started, that’s where it became structured in this country because that’s where we started to count people based on their skin color. When the census started in the 1700s, it was structured around race because they wanted to know who was White, who was a free slave, or who was a White male over eighteen and that was for the military.

That was in 1790. In 1790, the way that the census went out was free White males, free White females, and all other free persons enslaves. As the census evolved, it went into other categories. Those three categories that I shared were similar in the 1820s. In the 1850s, we started to look at the idea of mixed races. It went into White, Black, Mulatto, Black slaves, and Mulatto slaves.

It evolved over the years and we then have gone to White, Black, Mulatto, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese. It’s now starting to include race and ethnicity. You can look this up in census categories, look at the history of the census over the years, and see that we are all now having to check boxes about who we are.

My box isn’t even contained in any of the censuses. I identify as a Mestizo, which is a Spanish Indian mix, Mexican Indian mix, and it’s how I identify. I don’t identify as Latino, Mexican, or Native American, although those are all parts of my ethnicity. I identify as a Mestizo. The idea of all these racial categories has evolved now into all of these behaviors that we have witnessed in policing, healthcare, education, and pretty much every system in which we operate.

To jump into the Critical Race Theory conversation right here, Critical Race Theory is a theory that says race and racial disparities are inherent in the systems that we operate in nowadays, and that is true. It’s just as true as gender bias is inherent in the systems that we all operate in and religious bias and pick any other category.

The theory says that those systems are inherently racist. Nowhere in the research on Critical Race Theory does it then say that means that White people are all racist. That has been the political message that is being pushed out to get us to continue to fight with each other based on racial categories. Are there people who are doing damage by telling young people or sharing with White people that race is in fact the problem, or you are the oppressor or the oppressed, or White people are all racist? Absolutely there are.

I don’t believe that is the way to keep people engaged in the conversation. The idea that I think is valid is how we have these conversations in such a political climate and a climate of fear where we can’t even talk about race in schools now, or that we have states that are creating legislation that says you can’t say things that make White people uncomfortable.

It's valid how we have controversial conversations in such a political climate and a climate of fear where we can't even talk about race in schools, or that you can't say things that make white people uncomfortable, or that states are creating… Share on X

I understand that. I worked at a university in the Midwest. I was working with this group from the facilities. These are plumbers, pipefitters, and electricians, the majority of White men living in the rural part of the Midwest. By a description of them, you would think that I had nothing in common with them, growing up on the West Coast, being a person of color, and having a completely different lifestyle.

The interesting part of our work together was a lot of these White men, when I would talk to them, would say that they had to be here. They were required to spend eight hours with me, all 400 of this facilities group. The eight hours, the first part of it was conversations on bias, about how we have dialogue around how our biases, judgments, and stereotypes are created, and then how we deconstruct them. We did two hours on creative conflict transformation, what our conflict style is, and how conflict impacts our ability to have these conversations.

We spent the last part of our day talking about five strategies to deconstruct bias. Engaging with them in conversations about now that you are aware that you have stereotypes and biases and judgments, how can you deconstruct them? The most interesting part was the majority of these men would come in and ask me or tell me. I will start with what they have told me. What they told me is when my boss told me that I had to be at this workshop, the first thing I asked them is, “Is this going to be another one of those workshops where I’m going to be called a racist because I’m a White man?”

I understand that because for many White men, they are looked at as the problem. That’s wrong. I don’t look at anyone as the problem. We all play a role in where we are now in this race conversation. It’s no different than somebody looking at me through their lens of race or ethnicity and seeing me as either a Brown skin, a Mexican, Native American, or Spaniard, and then going to all of those stereotypes about those people and then treating me like that.

For somebody like me and practitioners doing this work, we are fighting against that. I have been fighting against that for most of my career to say, “Don’t put me in a box. Don’t put me in your story and your stereotype and then act like that’s who I am.” When we do that to White people, somehow we are justifying that it’s okay. That doesn’t logically make sense to me.

If it’s not okay for me to be put into a box and looked at as a whole group, why would it be okay for me to do that to a White man? The majority of these guys brought that perspective into our workshops together. I had 25 different, mostly men, and I say men because out of 400 people, about 10% were tradeswomen, and about 10% were tradespeople of color.

It was a majority of White men. They, for the most part, came in with this perspective that they were going to be labeled a racist or the problem based on how they looked. I don’t even know if they would identify as White because they may have had a completely different ethnicity that is more powerful to them than their race.

It took me a while in the morning to create a relationship with them. I will tell you what helped me. I remember a workshop I did years and years ago with a gracious woman. She came in and worked with a group of us when I was in Boulder. She told me this. She said, “If you remember these two things when you are doing your own work or whether you are doing work with people, you will be successful. Those two things are everyone has a good heart and everyone deserves to be trusted.”

When you are doing your own work or whether you are doing work with people, you will be successful if you remember these two things: 1. Everyone has a good heart, and 2. Everyone deserves to be trusted. Share on X

It’s hard for people to give that to other people who are different from them nowadays in America that we live in because of all of these stereotypes, judgments, and biases that are perpetuated and put on people because of how we see them. We don’t even take the time to get to know them. When I wrote that into the room of my workshops with the tradespeople I was working with, it took me a while for them to let down some of the barriers.

Once they did, we had the greatest conversations because what I found is that traveling across this country and having these dialogues, there is so much more that connects us than divides us. We are being poisoned with the rhetoric around division by politicians, news pundits, and people who want to continue to stir this pot so that we fight with each other because there’s a benefit in that.

The idea of this approach is to think about how we have the conversation. I’m going to jump back to my workshops. We spent eight hours together. After the first couple of hours of telling them my own stories and working hard to create connections, they started to realize that I wasn’t there to call them a racist. I wasn’t there to label them or to tell them they are the problem. In fact, it was the opposite.

I was there to engage with them, get to know them, and understand their perspective. What I found after four weeks of working with these groups of folks is that we have a lot of similarities. There’s a lot of care about making sure that we can take care of our families, that we provide opportunities for our kids to grow, that we are healthy, and that we are in loving relationships. That was a connection that I had with them.

I’m not going to tell you that every person who was in this workshop was taking it that way because I had some that I knew didn’t want to be there. I had some that behaved in ways for the entire eight hours that I had to figure out how to allow their behavior to happen without distracting me from everybody else in the room.

I had one gentleman for eight hours who read a newspaper loud. The way that looks was bizarre that for the whole day, he would have a newspaper in front of him, flip the pages, and make a lot of noise. He would mutter things under his breath, and he left a nasty note for me at the end of the workshop.

What I realized is that not everybody’s going to resonate with this conversation, and it’s for a whole variety of reasons. It’s because people don’t believe it. People don’t check their sources, and they believe everything they hear in the news or from their leaders. For this gentleman, I did my best to engage him and realized by lunchtime that he didn’t want to be engaged.

Not everybody's going to resonate with race conversations, and it's for a whole variety of reasons. It's because people don't believe it. People don't check their sources, and they believe everything they hear in the news or from their leaders. Share on X

I had to figure out how to get my message out to the other 23 people in the room without being distracted by one person. It was hard because I had to shift my behavior. We spent so much of our time in this conversation trying to change somebody’s perspective versus understanding what their story is because everybody has a story connected to race, and everyone has the propensity to use racism as a way to identify another person.

Even within our own racial groups, we talk about things like in the Black community around skin color, “You are too light. You are too dark.” It’s a big debate even going on about color within racial categories or our own groups. In my groups, it’s talking about who’s higher on the hierarchy. In Southwestern Colorado, there is still a debate going on between the Spaniards, Mexicans, and Native Americans about who’s better than who based on hundreds of years of things that have happened.

These are relevant conversations that we need to be having. We are being distracted by all of the rhetoric and theories that people are bringing up and doing it in a way that is creating stories that aren’t true. Critical Race Theory is not a theory of indoctrination. It’s a theory that says race plays a role in systems, and systems have the propensity to be racist based on the way that they were created. That’s not an untrue statement.

The untrue statement from my perspective means that everybody who works in those systems, if they are White, is racist. I totally believe that’s a false narrative. It’s a false narrative because we can’t paint a brush of a whole group based on the behavior of a few. To understand these systems, we have to go back to our founding fathers, which were mostly White men.

All of these systems were being created, the political system, business system, banking system, policing, and education. At that time, the people who were in charge were called the Founding Fathers. It wasn’t the Founding Fathers and Mothers. It was a group of mostly White men who created these systems for their benefit, and that’s a true statement.

People will ask me now, “Doesn’t that mean that they were all racist?” My answer to them is, “I don’t know,” because I can’t just look at somebody or see somebody’s actions 1 or 2 times and say that they are racist. I wasn’t there in the 1700 and 1800s. None of us were. Nobody can say for a fact that these men were all racist and all they did was want to demean other people. What I do know based on the history that I have looked at is that there was a whole era at that time that looked at anybody who didn’t fit that White male demographic as being less than, and that includes White women.

Those are the people who created those systems. What I can say with more certainty is that those men were biased, and the bias was their group. They created these systems for their group’s benefit. Much like if people who looked like me were creating these systems, we would have probably created them for our benefit as well because we would have been in charge. Had women been in charge at that time, they would have probably created those systems for their benefit. Part of our nature is that we want to create things that benefit our group.

At that time, anyone who wasn’t White and anyone who wasn’t a man was looked at as less than. If you understand that, that’s factual. That’s how all the systems in this country are created. The challenge with that conversation in 2022 is that some people are saying, “If you are part of that group, then you are automatically a racist.”

None of the White people that I work with and have worked with over the last years were around in the 1700 and 1800s. They didn’t create these systems. I can’t hold them responsible for what happened hundreds of years ago because they fit the demographic of that group. Logically, it doesn’t make sense to me because as a person who’s not White, I have been fighting against that type of grouping and treatment most of my life.

If it’s not okay for me, it’s not okay for somebody else. Those White folks that we are calling the problem and demeaning are the same people that we need to help us change these systems. What we need to do is think about what conversations we need to be having. I will umbrella this by saying that the real conversation that we are missing out on is the one around power. That is the fear of White men who have traditionally had power for hundreds of years who are now seeing that power displaced by having more women, people of color, and different sexual orientations in positions of leadership, religion and perspective, pick any category.

You will find that it’s changing the power dynamics of America. The greatest fear for some White men is that they are going to lose power, and that’s where that Great Replacement Theory comes in that says this invasion of people who look like me is a problem because we are out to conquer White America. For the majority of people who aren’t White, that’s not what we want to do.

What we want to do is to have an equitable opportunity to be successful in America. The rhetoric of this Great Replacement Theory is another conspiracy theory that’s now being accepted because people aren’t checking it. They are hearing it and saying, “That must be true that people of color are out to replace me.” I have been a politician. I served on a school board. I worked at the state legislative level in Colorado. I have worked with the education department. I worked with governors and legislators. I can tell you that there are people who are in a political position to get back at other people. I will also tell you those people are all different races and are using their power to harm other people.

The idea of power is the missing conversation. It’s easy to throw out this Great Replacement Theory or Critical Race Theory and say that that’s the issue or being woke. This whole idea that wokeness is some liberal idea or something that conservative people need to fear is ridiculous to me because it’s not perspective.

 

It’s a perspective that’s being shared by people who are sharing it from a position of fear and this idea that if they don’t do that, then they are going to lose constituents, power, or something. When you think about all of these theories that are now being weaponized and look at how they are being legislated in states across this country to where you can’t talk about race, LGBTQ, and things that make White people uncomfortable, that’s the way a lot of legislation is written because I have worked in states that have those legislations on the books. The interesting part is I still am able to have a great conversation with a whole variety of people, and we talk about bias, stereotypes, and supremacy.

The difference between the way I facilitate the conversation and others is I talk about it more from a perspective of how that affects all of us. If you take away the White from supremacy, supremacy is the idea that I’m better than you. There’s not a person on the planet who at some point in their life hasn’t been a supremacist who thought that they were superior to somebody else based on intellect, athleticism, having more money, and genealogy, whatever it is that we think.

This idea of supremacy is something that everybody holds. Even within communities of color, there are people who feel like they are better than other people even within those groups, and we all know that to be true. When we talk about White supremacy, it brings the ideology that we are talking about bad White people. I don’t believe that’s true and a way for us to keep people engaged in the conversation. For me, this is about how we have a conversation. Let’s stop talking about Critical Race Theory and Great Replacement Theory. Let’s start talking about this whole power structure and dynamic, and the cultural loss that White people may be feeling.

I remember when all of the statues from the Civil War were being torn down. I watched an interview with a gentleman from the South. He had been in the South for 5 or 6 generations. He had to explain himself to say, “I’m not a White supremacist. I don’t believe that I’m superior to anyone else, yet what’s happening is that my history is being torn apart and thrown away. I can’t even talk about the pride I have in my culture or the pride I have in being from the South because people associate the South with White supremacy and associate White supremacy with a bunch of races.”

When we do that, we are taking away the ability of this gentleman who has 5 or 6 generations in the South from being able to tell his story. We are messaging that “Sorry, your story’s not valid because you are these labels,” and that’s not right. I can understand why a White person might be reluctant to have this conversation.

When you get past race, there’s an ethnicity that’s associated with everybody. White, Black, and Brown are racial categories. They don’t define our ethnicity. The race conversation is so rooted in stereotypes, biases, and judgment that if people are stuck in those and unconscious of them, the chances of them treating other people based on those stereotypes go up. The next level is ethnicity, and that’s where your people are from.

I can’t tell you how many times I have worked with a group of White folks and they say, “I don’t have a culture and ethnicity.” I’m like, “You don’t have any ancestors? Where are your people from?” Everyone has an ethnicity, and ethnicity is where you are from. It doesn’t matter if you are from Africa, Jamaica, Germany, Russia, or Mexico. There’s a story there.

Your ethnic background is the story of your people. It’s the story of your beliefs and your values over hundreds of years. Everyone has an ethnicity. When we talk about culture, we are talking about the totality of your life experiences. Everyone has a culture. The challenge that we have is that if we can’t get past race, we never get to talk about who that person is. What is your ethnic background? What are your beliefs and values? How have those played out in your life experiences? That’s, in my perspective, the conversations that we need to be having.

 

We need to stop creating these false narratives around Critical Race Theory and Replacement Theory. Get to this real conversation about how it feels to have been completely at the top and empower in this hierarchical structure for hundreds of years and now see that shift to people who don’t look like you. Why does that cause fear?

I can’t sit back anymore and have our leaders put out this rhetoric on all sides of the aisle. The whole political system is another one that needs to be reworked, and it’s not going to be reworked just by creating a third political party. It’s this whole party process that is part of the challenge. The representative government worked well in the 1800s when I had to ride a horse from here to Washington to be able to have my voice heard.

Now, there are so many ways for people’s voices to be heard that there are not a lot of politicians that represent me because they represent a political structure that is in need of some rework. We can save that for another episode. I served as a politician for six years. I had to run a campaign, I served the school board, and I was a school board president, so I saw the way it played out.

When I ran for the school board, everybody said, “It’s apolitical. We don’t believe in politics in school board elections.” My mind has changed in 2022. It is one of the most politicized local structures that we have nowadays, and people are making choices about how to move through this. It’s so interesting to me when I think about how we fought segregation years ago, how Martin Luther King marched against White drinking fountains and colored drinking fountains, and signs about no Mexicans and no dogs allowed. All that segregation that we fought to eliminate, in some ways, is coming back now.

I found this article about a person of color guest house in Berkeley. What you have to know about me is whatever people want to do that makes them comfortable, I’m going to support them. My reasoning in sharing this is not to say this is right or wrong because if it supports people in feeling comfortable, then that’s great. My perspective in bringing this up is thinking that it’s almost like we are resegregating and doing it in a way that is culturally acceptable. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s a person of color that’s off campus, so it’s not part of the campus network.

It says things like, “White guests are not allowed in common spaces,” or, “Let people know if you are going to be bringing a White guest into the common spaces.” The idea is that people of color, the LGBTQIA community, and people who are of different religions have been treated disparagingly over the years, and why would we want to be in spaces where that would continue to happen?

That’s a great aspiration to create spaces like that. My question is, can that happen by just segregating ourselves into groups wherever we go? I don’t know where I can go where I live or where I can find people who walk like me and nobody else. In many ways, I have had to create that comfortability myself, yet I still belong to a man of color group and love being with them because we can talk in ways that we don’t have to explain ourselves and understand each other’s experiences and stories and we don’t question it. We don’t minimize it or act like it didn’t happen.

I’m also part of a group of diversity, equity, and inclusion practitioners, which is a mixed group of people from different racial backgrounds, genders, and identities. We get together for the same reason because we want to be able to have conversations with like-minded people so that we don’t have to explain ourselves and define everything.

Having these affinity groups is great. I just think that they can’t be so segregated that we don’t learn from each other. When I was in a role as a DEI Director in Denver Public Schools, we had affinity groups. These groups would meet separately to be able to talk, create community, and share stories. We also came together a few times a year as a mixed group to talk about what our shared issues are and how we work together to support each other’s issues.

That’s important to think about because the issues that we are seeing around race in America are not a Black issue, Brown issue, or White issue. This is everybody’s issue. We have young people who are very adept at having these conversations because they grew up in a different time and they grew up with a higher level of acceptance. The challenge that they have is the models from parents, politicians, and leaders are very divisive, and it’s very much rooted in taking care of their group.

It is a whole another conversation we could have about this great experiment that we are having in the world around people who, for generations, have been in the context of individualization to be more communal and to care about our neighbor or the person who lives next door to me or that works with me. That adds to it. All of these things are part of it.

What do we need to do? I’m going to give you my thoughts on what we need to do. We need to come together. One of the fears of some White people in positions of power is that if they keep communities of color divided, it benefits them. The fear is that if we come and work together, we could change the dynamic and the direction of this country and this planet in ways that are inclusive and engage everybody.

The fear of white men in positions of power is that if we come together and work together, we could change this country and this planet in ways that are inclusive and that everyone can be involved in. Share on X

Not in ways that we get our way and a White person doesn’t get anything. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is how we honor everybody and bring everybody along into this new world that we all live in. The reality of college students in 2022 is over 50% of them do not identify as White. They are mixed race. Within those mixed races, there are also White.

They are looking at, “Do I honor my White, Asian, Black, or Mexican side?” They are willing to have those conversations. For all the grownups out there, it’s thinking about what you are believing when you hear these theories. Are you doing any research on it, or are you taking face value? The news is no longer the news. The news is a lot of pundits who are putting their perspective on it, and whoever the followers are in those groups tend to believe it without even checking it, talking about it, or understanding what is going on. We need to check our facts. Realize that all these theories, Critical Race Theory, and Replacement Theory are just that. They are theories.

They don’t say that people are bad people. They say that in the systems that we operate in, we have to start to check and think about what is our role in perpetuating racism and what is our role in deconstructing stereotypes, biases, and judgments. There are ways to do that and honor who you are. What I would ask everyone who’s reading this is to engage in a conversation. A conversation is not, “I’m right and you are wrong.” The conversation is, “Tell me your perspective.” Everyone has a story. Everyone has time. Everyone reading here has a time that you can talk about in your life when something you did base on a stereotype of bias or a judgment towards another person impacted them and you in a way that maybe you didn’t want to.

A way that somebody saw you through lines of stereotype, biases, or judgment affected your relationship with them in a way that maybe you didn’t want it. We all have those stories. I can tell you story after story of ways that I disparaged other people based on my judgment, stereotypes, and biases. I can tell you ways that I have lifted other people up because I deconstructed my stereotypes, bias, and judgments about them and got to know them for who they are.

What this is about is being our most authentic selves. The approach that I would ask you to think about and dialogue about, and don’t email me and tell me it’s stupid, think about it, is this idea of inclusion and belonging. This idea is that I can be a part of this workplace, community, church, or group without having to give up a part of myself to do so. It’s this idea about being our most authentic self and thinking about what part of yourself you leave at home and what part of yourself you hide when you go out because you don’t think it would be accepted. We all have that part of ourselves. Inclusion is looking at the policies, practices, and protocols.

Inclusion allows us to dip into the systemic conversation about what are the policies, practices, and protocols that either lead to a culture or an authentic feeling of inclusion or lead to the opposite, which is exclusion. That’s a conversation that everyone can have. It’s not about talking about who are the bad people in the organization. It’s about what is the bad policy. What are the bad practices? What are the things that we are doing that are perpetuating the outcomes that we are getting? If you want to hire all the diversity that you want and still put them in a culture where you are eccentric, they won’t be successful. You have to look at the culture, and it has to adapt. It doesn’t have to go away. It has to adapt.

 

After we all witnessed the murder of George Floyd, pretty much every organization that I’m aware of decided to put out an equity statement and hire a DEI person. I’m sorry. That’s not enough. That’s not going to change anything. What we need to do is to think about your own personal role. There is an origination point for all of your biases, judgments, and stereotypes. They typically go back to when you were born to when you were an adolescent and maybe in high school, and for all of us, it’s similar.

What I’d leave you with is some work if you want to do it, and that is to journal and write down your early experiences. What did you hear about different people? How were people talked about in your home, community, or school? What meaning did you turn that into as an adult? How are those stereotypes, biases, and judgments still impacting how you see people who are different from you?

What I will leave you with at the end here is I am so hopeful. I believe that there are a lot of you out there who want to shift the divisive nature of our world, country, communities, your community, your workplace, your church, and whatever you belong to because you know that it’s not serving you and you know that it’s not serving your children.

Let’s engage in that conversation. I’m committed to creating a community that is willing to have this conversation. If you want to be a part of something aspirational, different, inclusive, and creating a sense of belonging, go to our website, DelaCruzSolutions.com. Give us your contact information, and we will include you in this. There is a way to move through where we are, and I want to be part of that. I want to be part of being hopeful and inclusive. I want to be accepted and accepting of people who are different from me.

I have given you a lot to think about. What I would encourage you to do is if you agree or disagree with something, don’t jump right into the email and tell me all of the negative things about it because that perspective is your perspective. If you feel it’s negative, talk to somebody about it and check your perspective. It’s not to say that you are wrong. It’s because I want you to think about your perspective. I want you to think about why you believe that something I’m saying you either agree or disagree with, not take it at face value because I don’t even have all the answers. What we have to start to do is to check ourselves.

I want to thank you all for engaging. If you send us your contact info, we will keep you with them because we have some great things coming up with an output we have been creating and with some development work that we want to share and some opportunities for all of you who want to make a change to create a worldwide community of people that are committed to inclusion, belonging, and acceptance. I end everything with huge gratitude and thanks for engaging the scene. I remind you all to keep growing. I’m excited to be a part of your community. Keep growing.

 

Important Links

• The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea
• @Bill.DelaCruz – TikTok
• @BillDelaC – Twitter
• @BillDelaC – Instagram